We love TV. We love TV so much that we designed a special reclining chair made for the sole purpose of comfortably watching as much TV as humanly possible. We’ve gone from three-inch screens to 100-inch screens, manual to remote control, wide-screen to flat-screen, SD to 3D to 4K, and beyond. We’ve added new words to the Oxford English Dictionary like binge-watch because of how much TV we consume. It helps raise us, teaches us, comforts us, and becomes part of our everyday conversation. It is also responsible for a piece of our cultural canon unlike any other: the sitcom. Born in part from the vaudevillian radio shows of the 1950s and earlier, no other medium gives viewers the opportunity to immerse themselves visually in a story half-hour after half-hour, week after week, and year after year. As we learn to love the characters and storytelling on-screen, there is one character that doesn’t make the top billing but is ever present—the set.

TV show sets are the places where characters and plotlines converge to create worlds. They give characters a tangible space for their stories to exist; they are the homes that welcome viewers into their favorite fictional worlds, and the playgrounds where actors create on-screen magic. They are the “sixth man” of any TV show and, in some cases, become even more iconic than the shows themselves. Behind the Screens imagines what famous TV apartments, houses, and offices would look like if they were to exist beyond the studio lots and soundstages where they were filmed.

The Brady Bunch

Premiering in 1969 on ABC, The Brady Bunch was created by Sherwood Schwartz (Gilligan’s Island) after he read an article in the Los Angeles Times that said 30 percent of marriages have a child or children from a previous marriage. The show’s premise was simple: Mike, a widower with three boys, marries Carol, a mother with three girls.

the Jack-and-Jill bathroom that connected the boys’ and girls’ rooms, as well as the attic." layout="wide" credit="From “Behind the Screens: Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time” by Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde with Neal E. Fischer, published by Chronicle Books" photoUserId=""/>

The Brady Bunch was not the first but is perhaps the most famous show about a blended family from two different worlds coming together to live under one roof. The bread and butter of the show was seeing the Brady kids playfully fighting and causing mischief before eventually hugging it out after learning a lesson from Mom and Dad in their iconic midcentury-modern home.

The Simpsons

The Simpsons made its network debut as a half-hour prime-time show on FOX in 1989. Created as a social satire and parody of Middle America and family sitcoms of old, The Simpsons takes place in Springfield, an average-sized city in an indeterminate state, and follows the titular family. Thanks to its successful combination of highbrow/lowbrow comedy, endless visual gags, parody, and satire (from a revered writers’ room full of Harvard grads and comedy titans, including late-night host Conan O’Brien), The Simpsons has been an important and influential advance in the television art form.

Frasier

Frasier was one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated shows of all time, with 107 Emmy nominations and 37 wins (the most for a comedy series). It outperformed The Mary Tyler Moore Show to set the record for most wins for a scripted series until it was surpassed by Game of Thrones. It’s also tied with Modern Family (which was cocreated by Frasier writer Christopher Lloyd) for the most consecutive wins for Outstanding Comedy Series with five years running.

Filmed on the same stage as Cheers, Frasier’s luxury condo was the envy of any series on TV with its open floor plan featuring walls lined with artifacts and contemporary art and completely implausible (but stunning) views of Seattle. To achieve Frasier’s expensive tastes, production designer Roy Christopher (Wings, Just Shoot Me!) and his team spent around $500,000 to outfit the interiors.

Friends

In 1994 David Crane and Marta Kauffman introduced the world to Friends, a show about a tight-knit group of twenty-somethings who lived in New York City and struggled to balance life, work, romance, and what it means to be an adult. For ten seasons, audiences followed these characters as they got together, broke up, had fights, made up, had babies, and above all else, supported each other. As arguably the most successful Warner Bros. property ever, Friends still generates around one billion dollars a year in syndication alone, and thousands of people flock daily to the Warner Bros. studio tour to sit inside the beloved set from Central Perk.

At the start of the series, Monica and Rachel shared the show’s central apartment, and Joey and Chandler shared the apartment across the hall. Throughout the seasons several roommate swaps occurred, though Monica and Rachel’s apartment was unique in that every character except Ross at some point during the show lived at that address.

Excerpted from Behind the Screens: Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time by Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde with Neal E. Fischer, published by Chronicle Books.

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