Sitcom Style

By Diana Friedman
As a child I watched a fair amount of TV. I remember being limited by how much I could watch and that I had a fairly early bedtime. Therefore I watched a lot of sitcom reruns in the hours between getting home from school and dinnertime. My favorite was the Brady Bunch, I was thoroughly fascinated by this large suburban family. Mine is very small so the idea of more than three or four people living in one space is completely foreign to me. The Brady's house and their frequent space and privacy issues were mind boggling to me. Why not move? Why doesn't Mr. Brady-an architect-build an addition? Why all that living space and then sleep in the tiniest bedrooms known to man? Where the hell are the closets?
Sitcom Style is a coffee table book dedicated to the scene design of the genre known as sitcom. This was an interesting book. Not only do I finally get the layouts of these homes that have plagued me with their inconsistencies for years, but the designers also discuss the set dressing and where and why they acquired it. My favorite bit of trivia. The granny square afghan on the back of Roseanne's couch was made for the show because the designer couldn't find one. And people kept lifting it from the set, so after the third one they had custom made it was stitched directly to the couch.
The book also has a strange aspect of it which is how to design your home to look like a sitcom home. Wanting your home to look like a sitcom? Now if that isn't a symptom of media obsessed consumerist America, I don't know what is.