AS FAR AS YOU CAN TELL A HOUSE BECOMES HOTEL WHEN YOU MAKE IT WHAT YOU WANT TO: Since we're already degenerating into Lost-level minutiae about Diff'rent Strokes, here's something I was thinking about this afternoon.
I believe, but could be convinced otherwise, that Diff'rent Strokes was the first show to assemble the complete version of the paradigmatic family sit-com main set. Slightly raised main entrance at house right, door to the rest of the house at house left, stairway upstage (running from house right at the bottom to house left at the top), couch downstage. Off the top of my head, after Diff'rent Strokes this was the layout for Cosby, Charles in Charge, Married With Children, and Modern Family (I have a vague recollection that it was the setup for Eight Is Enough as well). I'm into deep memory here, but I think that this set design builds on the All in the Family prototype, which is the same except that the couch is a pair of recliners/chairs sharing a table.
Am I wrong?
I believe Brady Bunch used a similar setup. Modern Family is a little different, since it's a single camera show, so the set for the Dunphy residence is built a little differently.
ReplyDeleteBrady Bunch, although the stairs come straight down.
ReplyDeleteBrady Bunch's living room was so much bigger and the layout was more open, wasn't it? I feel like you saw a much larger area from the living room (maybe just because of the top floor "balcony" at the top of the stairs, where people sometimes stood).
ReplyDeleteOr maybe if I watch Brady Bunch again, it'd be just like going back to elementary school and finding that the halls and lockers are much smaller than you remember.
My memory could be playing tricks on me, but I believe thats the setup for Everybody Loves Raymond, as well.
ReplyDeleteNo, Brady Bunch is different. There is an entirely separate entry foyer with a partial wall separating it from the living room and the stairs. The foyer has its own couch/loveseat combo opposing each other -- it's where Mike and Carol used to greet boyfriends, for example. If you enter from house right, you have to do a little detour downstage to get around the couch (which is oriented so that it faces the entry) and wall. Then you enter the living room. The stairs are pretty similar, but I can't get a read on the couch. I just can't remember if they shot a lot of scenes with the living room couch in the foreground and the stairs in the background. I do recall that they used to move around the living room well quite a bit so that you could see the coffee table and surrounding seats, which is a pretty big departure from the static way that the shows above were shot. Anyway, the separate foyer makes it pretty different.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking at the Mark Bennett plans online. I think Bennett is a bit wrong, but it does appear that instead of a separate entry foyer, some of the online pictures show the couch/opposing loveseat combo in the living room. They're still off to house right, not downstage, the point being that the composition isn't the same. You couldn't fix a camera in the center, have most of the action on the couch, and still catch people entering and exiting at house right, house left, and upstage in a single shot, which I gather was the point of the particular design.
ReplyDeleteThe set is built differently, but I would bet a large sum of money that there were discussions at some point about laying the living room out to match the typical multi-camera set. That's a show that is very aware of its relationship to the traditional family sitcom. The Phil-Claire talking heads in particular seem designed to evoke that Cosbyness. They get all four elements of the composition in the picture.
ReplyDeleteIt was.
ReplyDeleteIsaac - you are right about Eight is Enough. And I still feel bad about not giving you a point in the trivia contest for "Dr. Max" instead of "Dr. Maxwell" in an EiE speed-round, which you otherwise cleaned up.
ReplyDeleteAnd if I remember right, there is a den entrance straigth back in the upper right, slightly left to the exit to the penthouse balcony overlooking Central Park. (Oy, I watched too much TV as a kid.)
ReplyDeleteThis is so wondrously geeky.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Dr. Max was me. I think it was my Californian colleague.
ReplyDeleteThe Jeffersons?
ReplyDeleteNo stairs at the Jeffersons' apartment. Nice pad (dee-luxe, even), but not on a par with the Diff'rent Strokes Park Avenue two-floor thing. Philip Drummond was loaded. Remember, his family had slave-trade money.
ReplyDeleteWasn't the kitchen in the Charles in Charge house to the right not the left?
ReplyDeleteThe couches were also a sunken 70's-style conversation pit.
ReplyDeleteIt was to the right, but it was downstage of the front door, and in the standard fixed-camera shot it was too far downstage to be visible. There was another door at the left of the living room, which I think led to Charles's quarters.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's Married With Children, with the down-class change being a kitchenette and not a separate room off to the left.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, Roseanne has it all reversed.
Yeah, Roseanne was the mirror image, kind of an expansion of Leave it to Beaver (where the living room and the entry foyer with the stairs were not shot together, I think). I mentioned Married With Children, though.
ReplyDeleteA few houses I can think of with stage left doors: Alf, Grace Under Pressure, Roseanne, Family Matters. Silver Spoons had it in the back of the stage with a big staircase sweeping from lower left to upper right. Partridge Family (which predates DS) had stage left with stairs in back of the stage (slightly right). Mork & Mindy (a contemporary) had door to back, stairs to right. Happy Days, door to stage right/back (kitchen table was immediate stage right); Laverne & Shirley was door to stage right, stairs to center right (although this may have been the California seasons); Bonzana had the door to stage rear with no stairs.
ReplyDeleteAlthough most of the action took place in the kitchen, I'm reasonably certain that the "Family Ties" living room set follows this pattern.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there is a reason why this all seemed to flip in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As noted above, "Roseanne" is door and staircase left to right, as are "Family Matters" and "Full House," off the top of my head.
Actual "stage left" is on the actor's left. So I think you mean on the left of the stage from the audience point of view.
ReplyDeleteThough not a "family" sitcom, The Bunker house is the protypical "live before a studio audience" set on "All in the Family".
ReplyDeleteI think TPE meant house left. But I thought the Silver Spoons stairway went downstage to upstage, not left to right. I think there were big windows directly at the back of the living room, with doors to other parts of the house both under the stairway and off to the right. There may have been a raised hallway upstage above part of the living room. I swear I didn't watch this show much.
ReplyDeleteMork & Mindy didn't have stairs to the (house) right -- the stairs pulled down from the ceiling in the center of the room.
Happy Days also had stairs at house left, going from downstage to upstage and then turning toward house right (but obscured). The L&S Milwaukee apartment had the door at house right with stairs right outside the door; the California apartment had a weird door at house left about ten feet in the air with stairs that came down into that giant room.
Sure it's a family sitcom. Like I said, the only difference is that it's easy chairs, not a couch. That's not an insignificant difference, though, because the couch has a lot more utility in terms of mixing and matching characters, physical comedy, etc.
ReplyDeleteI had some very interesting things to say here, but about 20 minutes ago I had one (ONE!) of Maggie's dad's margaritas, and I have no idea what I was going to say.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you see the dining room between the living room and the kitchen, in front of the stairs. That's not part of the traditional setup you describe.
ReplyDeleteI made those for a party awhile ago, and we nicknamed them "Obliteritas." Strongest damn things ever, but very tasty.
ReplyDeleteSoap had the entrances for both the Tate and Campbell household on the house left. The Campbells, as the more middle-class family, had the standard couch in the middle of the room with the staircase behind it. The Tates had the staircase in the foyer, going straight back, with a balcony up at the top - you couldn't see into the living room from the stairs.
ReplyDeleteThey both had kitchens on the right end, with back doors that saw a lot of use (more at the Campbells' than the Tates.)
Janet - quite right - take all "stage left" and replace with "house left" etc.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking of Full House. Step by Step and Growing Pains also had the reverse set, I think.
ReplyDeleteStep By Step was also door=house left, as was Full House, and now I have dated myself to early 90's sitcoms.
ReplyDeleteAnd I realize I should have scrolled before posting my earlier comment, as gretchen has this covered.
ReplyDeleteAwed by this hard look at television art direction. 1950s family television shows were constructed around the back door, entrance to the kitchen and coffee klatsch ( residue perhaps from the first family Tv show, "The Goldbergs"). Dissertation topic: Is the kitchen island in American sitcoms a metaphor for the nuclear family as island in the sea?
ReplyDeleteDidn't Who's the Boss? have a similar setup as well?
ReplyDeleteFor those of you just joining us: the recipe for Maggie's Dad's Margaritas
ReplyDeleteDamn - now I'm homesick.
ReplyDeleteLovers of early 90s sitcoms, unite!
ReplyDeleteA bunch of shows have it reversed. Full House, Family Matters, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Drew Carey, Who's the Boss....
ReplyDeleteI think one of the interesting things about this setup is that it puts the camera where the television presumably would be. The only reason why it makes sense to have a couch facing the way it does in these sets is if there's a television opposite to it. We, the viewers, are basically in the television, watching the character. So are they watching us on their television sets whenever they're not on screen in scripted comedy? I feel like there's a short story in there somewhere.
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