David Crane and Marta Kauffman’s “Friends” is one of the great hang-out sitcoms of all time. Built around six immensely appealing and talented young actors, the series offered a peppy portrait of twentysomething/thirtysomething Generation X ennui. Its characters weren’t necessarily aimless, but they definitely didn’t have it together. What they did have was each other, which was a weekly Must-See TV balm for the souls of many a Gen X-er going through similar tsuris in the 1990s and 2000s.
While viewers all over the world could relate to the struggles of Monica (Courtney Cox), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Chandler (Matthew Perry), Ross (David Schwimmer), Joey (Matt LeBlanc), and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), there were aspects of these characters’ lives that were a tad hard to swallow. Sure, many of us knew what it was like to struggle to get by in a bustling metropolis like New York City (I lived there during the peak of the series’ popularity), but none of us could ever hope to slug it out while living in a stunningly spacious apartment in the West Village. As someone who did a fair amount of apartment hopping during that period, I will tell you that if a broker (which I couldn’t afford in the first place) showed me a flat akin to Monica and Rachel’s place, I would’ve punched them in the face for trying to humiliate me. That’s a rich person’s apartment.
How rich? That’s a question many people have asked over the years, and while we can’t give you exact numbers for fictional accommodations, we can ballpark it. Prepare to be astonished.
Monica and Rachel did not pay market value for the apartment
According to Architectural Digest, Monica’s “shabby chic” and “countrycore” apartment would’ve set off a bidding war the second it hit the market. So how did Monica land such prime Manhattan real estate? Her grandmother illegally sublet it to her!
Per the show’s canon, the apartment is rent-controlled, which means the unit’s rent increases were reasonably incremental to not drive the un-moneyed tenant (in this case Monica’s grandmother) out of her residence and, potentially, onto the streets. This means Nana, who’d retired to Florida, occupied this apartment for quite some time, and, as a senior citizen collecting Social Security in the Sunshine State (as was her right as a once hard-working American), probably didn’t need to charge her granddaughter market value for the unit.
Once you factor this in, you’re in the too-good-to-be-true realm of Hollywood entertainment, like Adam Sandler’s unemployed protagonist in Paul Thomas Anderson’s beloved “Big Daddy” living in a Manhattan loft because he banked a massive settlement off a minor accident. At this point, you should probably just shrug and enjoy the fantasy, which is easy to do because “Friends” was a consistently hilarious show with very few dud episodes. But you still need to know, right? Spoiler: Monica and Rachel would’ve never sniffed a Manhattan apartment of that caliber.
Monica and Rachel fell $200,000 short of being able to afford their apartment
In 2024, Architectural Digest cited the real-estate concierge company Clever, which used current Department of Labor statistics to determine that occupants Rachel and Monica — who worked, respectively, as a chef and a waitress at the series’ outset — earned $120,000 a year combined. They then zeroed in on apartment 12A at 136 Waverly Place in the West Village as a stand-in for the unit (estimated to be somewhere between 1,125 and 1,500 square feet) and decided Monica and Rachel would’ve had to pull down at least $321,429 combined to afford the rent straight-up. If they wanted to purchase the unit, they’d have to make $782,379 to cover the $2.65 million it would go for on today’s market. Obviously, any member of the “Friends” cast could afford to buy the entire building nowadays.
Had Crane and Kauffman taken a realistic approach to “Friends,” they would’ve placed Monica and Rachel in a railroad apartment somewhere in Alphabet City, which would’ve lent the show a decidedly gritty air that probably wouldn’t have appealed to people who like their network sitcom settings to be aspirational. Considering the circles the “Friends” gang traveled in, there also would’ve been more job turnover and copious cocaine use. Again, because I lived in New York City at the time, I would’ve loved this. My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that NBC might’ve frowned at such a depiction.
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