5 Times the New York Real Estate Market Drove TV Comedy Characters to Extremes
Warning: Contains spoilers for the plot of the latest episode of Poker Face, “A New Lease on Death.”
Whether or not you’ve ever lived in New York City, you probably know one thing about it: The rent, famously, is too damn high. This means the competition for decent housing options can be fierce; motivated tenants should be ready to do whatever it takes. In real life, that might mean going to a desirable neighborhood to walk the streets hoping to spot a “For Rent” sign, checking obituaries for imminent vacancies or bribing a landlord for special consideration. On TV, things can get even wilder.
NewsRadio
Dave (Dave Foley), on the verge of losing his current place, tours a vacant apartment and loves practically everything about it. But he’s not the only one who wants it: the very next would-be tenant is Lisa (Maura Tierney). Things get contentious immediately, as the realtor (Alaina Reed Hall) notes them greeting each other and asks if they’re friends, and Dave and Lisa simultaneously answer “Not anymore” and “Well, we used to be.” As one would expect from a workplace comedy, all their colleagues get involved in the fight over who should be awarded the nice apartment, but a tour for the whole office staff only confuses things more: Max (Jon Lovitz), appalled that neither Dave nor Lisa would take proper advantage of the chef’s kitchen, throws his hat in the ring too.
Joe (Joe Rogan) finally takes it to the then-still-nascent internet, inviting each of the prospective tenants to make their cases, via livestream, to the voting visitors at WNYX’s new website. Dave merely says he saw it first, feeling that should be sufficient; Max claims it will allow him to start a family — once he can bring women home to it. But Lisa is the only one to understand what internet users wanted then and still want today: adorable baby animals. Lisa tells the livestream viewers that the reason she wanted the apartment is so that she could get a dog, pulling a wee beagle puppy out of a box and telling them that if she can’t move in, Daisy will have to go back to the pound.
Dirty campaigning? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. And don’t worry — we do see Daisy again, still cute and thriving with Lisa. Had she been merely a prop that Lisa didn’t intend to keep, this gambit would be ranked much higher.
High Maintenance
The thing about dating apps is that, the way they live on your phone, dialing up a date might feel basically the same as booking a stay on Airbnb. So it is for Heidi (Greta Lee) when we meet her in the second episode of the original High Maintenance web series. She’s been crashing with Mark (Kyle Harris) for two weeks before a chance encounter with The Guy (Ben Sinclair) forces Mark to face reality: The reason Homeless Heidi arrived with so many bags is that she lives out of them — or, as The Guy puts it, she is “sin casa.”
By the time High Maintenance graduates from the web into an HBO sitcom, Heidi has also moved up in the world. Her latest partner Nihal (Sanjit De Silva) is so rich he has a full-time housekeeper to make Heidi breakfast pierogies, and space enough for Heidi to have a dedicated shoe closet. Everything is going her way until she happens to see a showbiz news piece about the forthcoming hipster TV series Homeless Helga, in which the titular sprightly scammer (Kimiko Glenn, as herself as Helga) gets outed by her boyfriend’s weed guy.
Furious that her intellectual property has been stolen, Heidi tracks Mark down to confront him, then uses her connection to another past OKCupid hookup — Hannibal Buress (as himself) — to enlist The Guy in her legal action against the project. It’s a risky move, since The Guy has obvious reasons not to want to involve himself in the justice system when he doesn’t have to — but fortunately for her, seeing how he’s portrayed in the show incenses The Guy too. In the end, it seems like Heidi secures a portion of the bag as a backup for her main scheme: locking down Nihal in a courthouse wedding. Maybe she does love him — or maybe she really loves the pierogies.
Friends
Most people remember “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” for the plotline that actually makes it into the title: Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) becoming the second-last Friend to find out that Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler (Matthew Perry) have been having a secret affair for months, and hatching a plan with Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) to force them to admit it. But the reason Phoebe is the second-last Friend is that the last one is in his own plotline, trying to weasel his way into a very desirable apartment.
Since the first season, Monica’s apartment has provided a prime view of her neighbor across the street, who’s been uncharitably dubbed Ugly Naked Guy. They’ve seen him buy a hammock, try out gravity boots and even enjoy a Thanksgiving date with Ugly Naked Gal, but in this episode they see him packing moving boxes. Ross (David Schwimmer) tries to swoop in to grab the apartment, but he’s not the only one who’s had the idea, and his small basket of mini-muffins is a poor bribe next to the many other gifts the current tenant has been showered with. Realizing that, as an academic on forced sabbatical, he’ll never be able to compete monetarily, Ross decides to appeal to him as a kindred spirit, coming over for a naked visit.
Ross certainly knows he’s risking his closest friends spotting him during his nude frolic. But you can’t argue with the results, and Ross continues living there through the season finale.
Futurama
Fry (voice of Billy West) has adapted so well to life in 31st century New New York that he easily agrees to get an apartment with Bender (John DiMaggio), a robot. Some things haven’t changed since Fry’s era, including that an astonishingly great place can be summarily rejected for being “technically in New Jersey,” and that your best lead may be via a recently deceased person’s social network — in this case, Professor Farnsworth (West), who gives Fry and Bender a tip on a dead colleague’s place. It seems like a perfect setup, until they throw a viewing party for a big episode of their favorite show, All My Circuits, and the satellite TV signal goes on the fritz.
When the culprit turns out to be Bender’s antenna, he immediately gets evicted, while Fry disloyally remains. Bender is so bereft that he forgoes alcohol for days — which, for a robot, has the same effect as booze on a human, like slurred speech and maudlin declarations — finally rushing into Fry’s apartment with bolt cutters and removing his antenna himself. Many “antenna as penis” analogies later, Fry understands what a big sacrifice this is, restores Bender’s full anatomy, and moves into Bender’s apartment, where the space Bender calls a closet is actually a gigantic apartment with an enormous picture window. Living in a closet is rough, though people in New York do it all the time; I think it happens less often that a prospective tenant decides the only way to get the living situation they want is via self-mutilation.
Poker Face
You might assume that Anne (Lauren Tom), as a retired poetry professor, wouldn’t have much to leave Madeline (Awkwafina), the granddaughter Anne has raised for most of Madeline’s life. What Anne does have is a gigantic rent-controlled apartment, so she’s decided to legally adopt Madeline — even though she is well into her adulthood — so that Anne can pass the lease on to her, since only spouses and children may enjoy this benefit. While they’re waiting the three months for the paperwork to go through, Anne “happens” to meet Kate (Alia Shawkat) at the bodega when they’re reaching for the same plum. One William Carlos Williams quote is all it takes for Anne to start being seduced; two weeks later, Madeline walks in on what she thinks is a violent attack on Anne, but turns out to be Anne and Kate having noisy sex. Before Madeline knows it, Anne has asked Kate to move in; not long after that, they’re engaged.
Madeline’s suspicious of the speed with which this relationship has progressed, and rightly so: she finds out Kate’s real name is Amelia, and that there are three warrants out for her arrest. She orders Amelia to break things off with Anne on threat of letting the state of Minnesota know where Amelia is. She agrees, if she can have a little time — supposedly to let Anne down easy, but actually to set up a Rube Goldberg death machine in the building’s poorly maintained laundry room. This being Poker Face, justice does come for Kate/Amelia in the form of bullshit detector Charlie (Natasha Lyonne), though Madeline doesn’t live to see it.
And though Kate/Amelia is clearly a sociopathic murderer who shouldn’t be allowed to prey on sexy sixtysomethings, if I thought I could get into a four-bedroom, three-bath apartment for $640 a month, I don’t want to say what I might do.
