The Universal Grammar of '90s Sitcom Houses

15 Robin Hood Lane in Massapequa, Long Island, is a four-bedroom Victorian with a home office on the ground floor and a complete apartment above the detached two-car garage. Occupied by the Seaver family from 1985 to 1992.

Two features of this home are worth noting.

First: the ground-floor office. Dr. Jason Seaver is a psychiatrist who runs his practice from this home. His office is located directly off the living room, accessible only through the front door. Every single therapy patient walks through the Seaver family living room to get to their appointment. You're struggling with depression or your marriage is collapsing or you're having a breakdown—maybe something about your mother, probably something about your father, definitely something requiring professional help. You ring the doorbell. Three teenagers are fighting over the TV remote while eating Hot Pockets. You say "Excuse me, sorry, I have an appointment with—" and squeeze past them. Fifty minutes later you emerge crying—possibly having just had a major emotional breakthrough about how your father never told you he loved you—and have to exit through that same living room where the teenage son is now hiding a girl in the coat closet. And you can't help but think: at least their dad is home.

Dr. Seaver is professionally trained to understand boundaries. This is his actual job. Yet he operates with zero patient privacy while his patients navigate maximum chaos twice per session.

Second feature: the apartment above the garage. Mike Seaver—the troublemaker teenage son who most needs supervision and least deserves autonomy, the same teenager who hides girls in coat closets—has his own private space. Separate entrance. No parental oversight. He can throw parties, sneak girls in and out, come and go without anyone knowing. His younger siblings share bedrooms in the main house. Mike has more square footage than his father's patients have dignity.

The spatial logic is backward. The kind of backwards logic that only makes sense if you're optimizing for plot, not parenting.

None of this makes sense. Unless you understand that the Seavers aren't a real family.

The Pattern

The Seavers were the stars of ABC's *Growing Pains* (1985-1992). The show ended just as ABC's TGIF branding was solidifying into a cultural institution, but the architectural grammar was already established. What made no sense as parenting made perfect sense as sitcom architecture. The office had to be off the living room because that's where awkward encounters happen. Mike had to have privacy because unsupervised teenagers generate plot.

And here's the thing: every ABC sitcom from that era follows the same architectural grammar.

Living room stage left. Kitchen stage right. *Always*.

Over TGIF's 11-year run, approximately 30 shows aired on Friday nights, but only 9 reached syndication (65+ episodes). Excluding *Perfect Strangers* and *Sabrina the Teenage Witch* (non-family-centered sitcoms), 5 of the remaining 7 family sitcoms followed the living-room-left template—a 71% match rate. The two outliers followed the opposite orientation, continuing a pattern where shows depicting Black families consistently used the mirrored layout.[^1]

[^1]: Shows featuring Black families—including *The Cosby Show*, *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*, *Sister, Sister*, and *Hangin' with Mr. Cooper*—followed a living-room-right, kitchen-left orientation, while white family sitcoms followed the opposite. This may have been driven by production companies: Miller-Boyett produced most white family sitcoms and *Family Matters*, the only Black family show with the white-family layout. Most telling: *Hangin' with Mr. Cooper* shot its pilot on the *Growing Pains* set, then deliberately flipped the orientation for the permanent set. They started with the white family template and actively chose to mirror it.

This is true for *Growing Pains*. This is true for *Full House*. This is true for *Family Matters*. This is true for *Step by Step*. This is true for *Boy Meets World*. This is true for almost all ABC family sitcoms from 1989 to 2000—especially the most culturally consequential ones, the shows that lasted long enough for syndication to drill their floor plans into our collective memory.

NBC's *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* had the opposite layout—kitchen on the left, living room on the right. But the spatial logic was identical, just reflected. Different audiences, different networks, different demographics. Same architectural grammar. Same impossible houses. Same backward parenting decisions.

TGIF stood for "Thank God It's Friday," which was ABC's way of branding Friday night as family television night. In my house—the pastor's house—that technically qualified as religious programming. My dad routinely wrote his sermons while watching professional wrestling on Monday nights, so the bar for permissible content was low.

My family did this. We were those people. Friday nights were sacred—pizza from the local place, sitting in the living room, watching whatever ABC told us to watch. I can still sing the entire *Family Matters* theme song but can't remember my own phone number.

The lineup rotated over the years, but the core principles remained: family-friendly, studio-audience sitcoms, 7:00-9:00 p.m. Central Time, same spatial grammar, same consequence-free chaos, same lessons learned by 7:28, 7:58, 8:28, and 8:58 respectively. The shows changed but the architecture didn't.

The living room couch always faced the audience. The kitchen always had an island or peninsula. The front door always opened directly into the living room—no foyer, no hallway, just instant access to the family's primary gathering space.

This door placement is crucial. In real houses, front doors lead to entryways. In sitcom houses, front doors lead to plot. Kimmy Gibbler doesn't knock and wait in a foyer—she walks directly into the Tanner living room mid-sentence. Same with Urkel, who used the Winslows' back door so frequently that Carl should have just given him a key and started claiming him as a dependent. Same with every neighbor, friend, or antagonist who needs to catalyze a scene.

The door hierarchy tells you everything about sitcom social code. Front door: formal, new people, authority figures. Back door: intimacy, regulars, people who belong. If Kimmy Gibbler had been a "front door friend," she would have been a completely different character. The back door was her entire personality—the casual intrusion, the presumed intimacy, the disregard for boundaries that was supposed to be endearing rather than restraining-order-worthy.

Real families lock their front doors. Sitcom families can't afford to. The plot needs access.

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## The Stairs That Go Nowhere

But the real architectural impossibility—the thing that became the defining feature of TGIF homes but basically never existed in actual middle-class American houses—was the dual staircase.

*Growing Pains* didn't have dual staircases. People exited through doors we assume led back to the living room, or walked out the back toward Mike's apartment. But *The Cosby Show*—NBC's Brooklyn brownstone that dominated the mid-'80s—featured dual staircases prominently. And once TGIF solidified as a brand, the dual staircase became standard.

One staircase in the living room for dramatic entrances and exits. One staircase in the kitchen for subtle escapes and eavesdropping. You're dedicating like 10-15% of your floor plan to redundant vertical circulation.[^1] No architect designing an actual family home would do that—it's wildly inefficient. But if you're designing a set where you need teenagers to stomp upstairs in anger (living room stairs) and then sneak back down to eavesdrop on their parents (kitchen stairs), you need both.

[^1]: To be clear: I did not do the actual math on this. But I've watched enough HGTV to feel fairly confident that staircases eat up way more space than you think. Two of them in a 2,200-square-foot house is architectural malpractice.

The Tanner house has a main staircase in the living room and a back staircase near the kitchen.[^2] The Brady house has the main staircase and the floating stairs that Jack built. *Family Matters* has both. *Step by Step* has both. The dual staircase became the TGIF signature—the architectural feature that separated Friday night ABC from everything else.

[^2]: For context: the Tanner house in San Francisco would need roughly 8,000 square feet to make their dual-staircase layout actually work. They live in a Victorian that's maybe 2,200 square feet. An 8,000-square-foot Victorian in San Francisco would cost approximately $8-12 million today. Danny Tanner is a sports anchor for a local TV station (later a morning show host). Joey is an unemployed comedian who does cartoon voices. Jesse is a musician/exterminator. The math doesn't math.

Two staircases in a three-bedroom house. In San Francisco. Where even a normal Victorian would cost $2-3 million today.

Nobody needs two staircases. But sitcom houses do, because the stairs aren't about circulation—they're about scene transitions. You need the dramatic exit up the front stairs AND the sneaky arrival down the back stairs. The architecture serves the narrative, not the other way around.

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## The Dinosaurs in the Room

Here's where things get weird: ABC's TGIF lineup, which was built on wholesome family sitcoms about suburban normalcy, included a show called *Dinosaurs*. A sitcom. About dinosaurs. Anthropomorphic dinosaurs in a Stone Age family dealing with suburban problems. Dad works at a tree-pushing company. Mom stays home. Teenage son is rebellious. Baby hits dad with a frying pan and says "Not the mama."

It ran for four seasons (1991-1994) and maintained the exact same architectural grammar as every other TGIF show. Living room stage left, kitchen stage right, front door opening directly into chaos. The Sinclair family lived in a house designed exactly like the Tanner house and the Winslow house and the Seaver house, except they were dinosaurs.

And then—in what might be the darkest moment in TGIF history—the series finale had them accidentally cause their own extinction. The dinosaurs trigger an ice age through corporate negligence and spend the final episode watching their world end. No twist. No rescue. Just extinction. On Friday night family television.

The show ran for exactly 65 episodes. The precise threshold for syndication. It's almost as if extinction was part of the plan—they knew how it would end because we all know how it ended. The whole existence of the show was built on the premise that these characters were already dead. A show about a family heading toward their own death, canceled at exactly the moment it achieved immortality through syndication. Fossilized, in a way. Which is probably the point. Syndication is how our society displays its most prized cultural artifacts.

This was the same network that gave us Danny Tanner's gentle life lessons and Carl Winslow's patient wisdom. But apparently ABC was fine with teaching children about nuclear winter and ecological collapse at 7:30 p.m., sandwiched between *Step by Step* and *Mr. Cooper*.[^3]

[^3]: The weirdest part? Kirk Cameron—Mike Seaver himself—would go on to become obsessed with the apocalypse. Not in the "global warming might be bad" way that *Dinosaurs* portrayed it, but in the "we're all getting raptured" way. He starred in the *Left Behind* movies, which are basically the Christian fundamentalist version of the *Dinosaurs* finale except you're supposed to be excited about it if you're saved and terrified if you're not.

As an evangelical Christian kid growing up in the '90s, I absorbed all of this as perfectly normal. ABC taught me the world might end on Friday nights. Church taught me the world might end on Sunday mornings. My dad, the pastor, figured since Jesus said he didn't even know when he was coming back, we probably shouldn't spend too much time speculating. But a lot of people were majoring in the minors on that one. Really wanted to pinpoint the date Jesus was coming back, spent a lot less time doing the things he actually did the first time he visited.

Kirk Cameron went from the garage apartment to rapture movies. The apocalypse was just part of the programming.

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## What You Could and Couldn't See

I should note something: I'm a lower-middle-class white kid from rural Minnesota. We didn't have cable. ABC was the closest station we could pick up via antenna, which meant Friday nights were TGIF or nothing. CBS was programming for my grandma's generation. NBC's Must See TV Thursday might as well have been on a different planet.

I couldn't see NBC. Literally. No reception.

Which meant I couldn't see *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* or *Friends* or *Frasier* or *Seinfeld*. And I missed Frasier and Niles Crane hilariously risking their medical licenses every week with the same reckless boundary violations as Dr. Seaver, just with better wine and more neuroses. By the time we got cable and I discovered these shows in syndication, much of my architectural foundation had already been established. The ABC grammar was hardwired.

But here's the thing: even when I could finally see those shows, I still couldn't see into those worlds.

I had no framework to audit whether the Banks family's Bel-Air mansion was architecturally plausible, socially accurate, or completely fictional. The impossibilities I could spot were in worlds adjacent to mine—suburban TGIF families where I could immediately tell that the Seaver house made no sense. The impossibilities I couldn't spot were in worlds I'd only seen on TV. But they were still impossible—built for the same narrative mechanisms, following the same writers' room logic.

*The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* ran Monday nights on NBC, and it had the opposite layout—kitchen on the left, living room on the right. More importantly, it had a foyer. A grand entrance with a staircase where Will and Carlton could make entrances. The front door didn't dump you directly into family chaos—there was a buffer, a transition space, the kind of architectural breathing room that makes sense in a mansion but never appeared in ABC's suburban sets.

But despite the different architectural grammar, the Banks family made the exact same narrative mistake as the Seavers.

Will Smith—the kid from West Philly who got sent to Bel-Air specifically because he got in one little fight and his mom got scared—ends up in the pool house. A separate structure with its own entrance where he can come and go without supervision. Meanwhile Carlton—the straight-A student who's never been in trouble in his life—has a regular bedroom in the main house where his parents can monitor him.

Judge Philip Banks put the troubled kid in the unsupervised apartment and kept the responsible kid under watch. The same backward spatial logic as Dr. Seaver, just in a different tax bracket.[^3]

[^3]: Unlike the Tanners, Judge Banks could actually afford his mansion. As a superior court judge in Los Angeles—one of the most powerful judicial positions in California—and likely having made significant money as an attorney before taking the bench, he's the only sitcom parent whose wealth makes sense.

NBC's Must See TV Thursday had its own impossibilities. *Friends* gave Monica a mysteriously massive Greenwich Village apartment—technically her grandmother's rent-controlled place, but still. She's a chef. Chandler's a data processor. Rachel works retail. Joey's an unemployed actor. Even with rent control, the impossibility wasn't just the layout—it was the entire premise that six people in their twenties with those jobs could afford to live in Manhattan at all.

Different networks. Different demographics. Different impossibilities. But the same underlying principle: we learned what life looked like from spaces built for narrative, not reality.

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## ABC's Formula

*Growing Pains*, *Full House*, *Family Matters*, *Step by Step*, *Boy Meets World*—these were all ABC shows. The formula was consistent: suburban families with impossible houses, chaos that somehow resolves by the closing credits, architecture optimized for maximum narrative dysfunction.

The architectural grammar was rigid. Living room stage left, kitchen stage right, front door opening directly into the living room, dual staircases. Every show. Same blueprint.

It didn't matter whether the Seavers lived in Long Island, the Matthews in Philadelphia, the Lamberts in Wisconsin, or the Winslows in Chicago. Geography was cosmetic. The architecture was universal.

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## The Realtor Test

When you scroll through actual home floor plans on Zillow or Redfin, looking at houses built in the '90s, you develop an eye for what's real and what's sitcom fiction. You learn to read square footage. You understand load-bearing walls and traffic flow and whether a kitchen layout will make you want to cook or order pizza forever.

Not once will you find a house that matches the sitcom grammar.

Real houses have hallways. Real houses have doors that close. Real houses have awkward spaces—the weird corner where the addition meets the original structure, the bathroom you have to walk through a bedroom to reach, the closet that's technically in two rooms at once.

Sitcom houses have none of this. They're stage sets masquerading as homes. Every room is perfectly proportioned. Every sightline is clear. Every door opens to exactly where the camera needs it to open.

But here's what's interesting: none of us noticed. We watched these shows for years and absorbed their spatial logic as normal. We accepted that Urkel could walk into the Winslow house without knocking. We accepted that the Seavers' therapy practice violated every HIPAA regulation that didn't exist yet.[^5] We accepted that the back stairs led somewhere and nowhere simultaneously.

[^5]: HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) wasn't actually passed until 1996, and the privacy rules didn't go into effect until 2003. So Dr. Seaver's practice was merely *unethical*, not yet *illegal*.

We learned what houses were supposed to feel like from houses that couldn't exist.

And then some of us built real houses based on those lessons. By the late '90s, actual home design started borrowing from sitcom architecture. Open floor plans became standard. The kitchen island that faced the living room—pure sitcom logic—became the most requested feature in new construction. The front door that opens directly into the living room became aspirational. Design blogs praised "homes without barriers." We called it "flow."

The fictional grammar colonized the real world. We built houses optimized for being watched. And then COVID happened and we all had to perform in them. Every Zoom call was a Dr. Seaver moment—trying to have a professional conversation while your family's chaos played out in the background. Kids fighting over Hot Pockets in the kitchen island behind you. No doors to close. No hallways to hide in. Just you and your open floor plan and everyone watching. 

During seasons 1 through 3 of the global reality sensation, we tried to construct walls—temporary and permanent—in the places where we'd torn them down. We tried to add doors where we'd removed them. The coat closet where Mike Seaver would have hidden a girl became a temporary office for conference calls. Our open floor plans had betrayed us. We'd spent thirty years building sitcom sets and forgot that sitcom families had the cameras turn off between takes.

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## What We Actually Learned

But here's the thing: the architecture wasn't the only fiction we absorbed as normal.

Kids got picked up by the cops all the time in '90s sitcoms. Mike Seaver, DJ Tanner, the Winslow kids, Zack Morris on *Saved by the Bell*. Even Carol Seaver—the responsible one—had an episode called "Carol In Jail." Shoplifting, joyriding, underage drinking, trespassing—you name it. The cops would show up, there'd be a serious talk with the parents, and then… nothing. No charges. No real consequences beyond the emotional lesson learned.

No sitcom kid has a criminal record, but a disproportionate number of them have been arrested. They're like congressmen that way.

I know this because I lived this. I got picked up by cops as a teenager more than once, mostly for being places I wasn't supposed to be doing things that were marginally illegal. Small town. Kids had to get creative to stave off boredom. Minor juvenile delinquency was just the cost of doing business. Each time, the cops called my parents, there was a conversation, and I learned my lesson. No charges were ever filed—except one time.

I got a reckless driving ticket. Actual charges. Court date. I had to go before a judge—Judge Richards, who knew my family, which in a small town means he knew everything about everyone. I was seventeen. Terrified. Convinced this was going to ruin my life.

When I told my dad about the court appearance, he didn't lecture me. He just said he couldn't wait to hear how I planned to talk my way out of this one. And we both laughed. That was the whole conversation. No lesson. Just the shared language.

I'd prepared a speech the night before on MSN Messenger with a girl I had a crush on.[^6] Something about youthful indiscretion and lessons learned and how this experience had already taught me to be more responsible. Very Mike Seaver. Very sitcom third-act sincere apology. I was going to deliver it earnestly, show the judge I'd learned something, make him see I was worth giving a second chance.

[^6]: MSN Messenger: the AOL Instant Messenger competitor where you could change your screen name to passive-aggressive song lyrics and your crush would definitely notice and definitely understand exactly what you meant.

She told me life doesn't work that way. I told her she was wrong.

She was right. Judge Richards, who had clearly never watched TGIF in his life—probably watching *Law & Order* on Friday nights like a normal person—and as such had not taken his cues from Judge Banks as I had from my sitcom counterparts, looked at the ticket, looked at me. He asked me some questions. I gave the answers I was supposed to give—yes sir, no sir, I understand sir, it won't happen again sir. The speech I'd rehearsed never happened. It wasn't that kind of scene.

But there were consequences. Forty hours of community service.[^7]

[^7]: The "reckless driving" was me driving across a parking lot at walking speed while a couple of my friends jumped on the back of my trunk to ride fifty feet to their car. Technically illegal. Technically reckless. Also: teenagers being idiots in the most harmless way possible. I did much worse things that were legitimately illegal, but I never got caught doing those.

I went to court alone. But when I got home and told my dad what happened, we hatched a perfect sitcom plan. My community service ended up being mowing the lawn at the church, which my dad was the pastor of. And was my actual summer job anyway. We pulled a sitcom reversal on Judge Richards.

Judge Richards thought he was teaching me accountability. What he actually taught me was that sitcom logic works if both parties believe in it hard enough. My dad and I pulled a Very Special Episode on the judicial system.

My dad learned the grammar from the same shows I did. Life wasn't a sitcom. Except when it was.

On TGIF, that courtroom scene would have been the Act Two complication leading to the Act Three resolution. Danny Tanner would have given a speech. Carl Winslow would have had wisdom. The soft music would have swelled. Credits would roll on a hug and a lesson learned.

Real life just had the judge, the ticket, the walk to the parking lot. No soft music. Just forty hours of community service and figuring out how to tell my dad what happened.

But here's what did work like sitcoms: the other nights. The times I broke curfew and came home late. Those negotiation sessions were my second staircase—the alternate route when walking straight through consequences was too hard. I could sneak down through humor when I knew that making my dad laugh would disarm whatever anger or frustration he had. He couldn't lock me out of negotiation even when I deserved it. Because we both believed in sitcom logic: the plot needs access. And I was very good at creating plot. Still am, apparently—you've made it 3,500 words into this essay about sitcom floor plans.

It worked because my dad had learned fatherhood from the same shows I'd learned childhood from. I deployed sitcom logic on my sitcom-educated father, and it was effective because he believed in the same architecture.

The court appearance taught me the real world doesn't run on teaching moments. But the negotiation sessions taught me something else: humor as survival mechanism. Making someone laugh as a way to say "I know I messed up and I know you're frustrated and I can see the absurdity of this situation we're in."

That's not sitcom logic. That's something deeper. The thing sitcoms were pointing at even if they weren't reaching it.

My dad and I built a back staircase. The alternate route when the front door was locked. He couldn't say "I love you," so we found another way to say it. That's what the humor was—our architectural workaround for words that didn't exist. Because the plot needs access. And when you run into walls, when you can't say the thing you need to say to move the relationship forward, you have to build workarounds. Real love requires access, even if it's through the back stairs.

And my dad did the same thing with my brother—gave the rebellious older son the private quarters. Doctor, judge, pastor—all making the same mistake. We both learned architecture from television.

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## The Thing About Consequences

Here's what I'm only now understanding about sitcoms: they were extremely predictable.

For all the chaos built into those houses and those families—the dual staircases, the unlocked doors, the therapy patients navigating domestic warfare—we always knew exactly how it would work out. We could see all the dots aligning. We knew the problem would resolve itself in the most sitcom-y way possible. That anticipation, and the satisfaction when it happened exactly as expected, was deeply comforting.

We'd been trained on the formula since childhood. We could write these scripts ourselves. They were predictable. There were no surprises. Yet we still watched them. And rewatched them in syndication. Even though we knew every beat, every joke, every resolution.

Because predictability is its own kind of comfort. Especially when real life refuses to follow any script at all.

My dad died twelve years ago in a Walmart parking lot. It was February, the dead of winter, a heart-stoppingly cold 20 below zero. And that's what happened. His heart stopped. One moment he was there. And the next he was gone.[^9]

[^9]: I got the call from my sister on a Saturday. I was at brunch—which is embarrassing in that I'm guessing the word "brunch" never passed my dad's lips, nor had he ever partaken in such a silly thing. My dad was dying in the dead of winter in a Walmart parking lot. And I was eating Eggs Benedict.

When people hear that, they get this look—like they're trying to figure out if they should be sympathetic or if it's okay to acknowledge how absurd it sounds. I usually help them out: "It's okay. He would've wanted to go that way. He loved Walmart."

And he did. He went to Walmart every day to, quote, "see what kind of new stuff they had."

As if Walmart was just rolling out innovative new products every day to dazzle the small-town shoppers.

Given how frequently he visited, the odds were pretty good he'd die in that parking lot.[^10]

[^10]: I haven't done the actual math on this—it feels disrespectful to calculate the probability of your father's death location—but statistically around 70% of sudden deaths occur at home, and Walmart was like my dad's second home, so there was a pretty good chance he'd die in one of those two places. Ok, maybe I did do the math.

He wasn't actually obsessed with the latest Walmart innovations. He really went to get some space from my mom, who was extremely extroverted, while he was very introverted. They no longer had any children at home to serve as buffers. Walmart was his escape.

A few months after he died, we found out he wouldn't have passed his vision test in May when his license was up for renewal. He would have lost his ability to drive. Which meant he would have lost his freedom—his ability to do what he wanted when he wanted to do it, which was core to his personality. Instead of getting to go to Walmart to escape for a couple hours a day, my mom would have been the one to drive him there. Which would have really defeated the point.

So in February, in a Walmart parking lot, before he lost the one thing that gave him daily autonomy, he was gone.

Of course that's when it happened. Of course.

That's the sitcom grammar talking. Finding the narrative in the timing. Seeing the story beat in the randomness. Believing that chaos is actually structure we just can't see yet.

Except real life doesn't work that way. Real grief doesn't have scene transitions. It doesn't have dual staircases—one for dramatic exits and one for sneaking back to eavesdrop on how everyone's really doing. It just has the one reality, and you're stuck in it, and there's no reset for next week.

In a sitcom, I would have gotten one last phone call. The kind where everyone finally says what they need to say. A last and first "I love you" right before the tragedy, giving it meaning, making it matter. First because I'd never said it to him either. But this wasn't a sitcom.

He was my hero. From childhood through his death, that never changed. I think we understood each other in ways we couldn't articulate. The respect felt mutual. The admiration was profound. We just didn't have the words for any of it.

Sitcoms taught us that problems resolve in 22 minutes. My dad gave my brother the private quarters because Dr. Seaver gave Mike the garage apartment. He learned parenting from sitcom logic. I learned family dynamics from sitcom logic. We all did.

The architecture was fiction. The consequence-free chaos was fiction. The neat resolutions were absolutely fiction.

But maybe that wasn't entirely wrong.

My dad never said "I love you" with words. But he made me laugh instead of having serious talks. He gave my brother the space to figure out who he was. The difference between my relationship with my dad and my siblings' relationships was that he and I shared a language: humor. That was our thing. Maybe the fiction contained some truth about how to love people in languages they can actually understand.

I have two kids now. When they do something wrong, I tell them I love you. With actual words. And then I make them laugh. I'm giving them both staircases—the front stairs everyone's supposed to use, and the back stairs we built when the front ones didn't exist.

It's not lost on me how strange it is that I remember all the details of these sitcom families—decades after I watched the last episode. The only route I had to mourning my father ran through the Seaver house. Through floor plans that couldn't exist and families that weren't real. I had to decode my actual family through the fake ones I watched every Friday night.

He taught me this, actually. How to say what you mean by taking 5,000 words to get there. When I was sick from school, he'd write my excuse notes—two full pages of witty meanderings explaining to the office secretary what I may or may not have been up to that led to my absence. I was usually late returning to class because they insisted on reading the entire thing and sharing it with others in the office. As a teenager, I was horrified. Then proud. He was showing me that the roundabout route can be the most direct way to say something true. That humor and observation and cultural criticism can be another language for the things you can't say plainly. This essay is one of his notes. Just longer, and about him.

And when I talk to my own therapist—who also works from home, just like Dr. Seaver—I don't have to walk through their family's chaos to get to the appointment. We meet virtually. Different architecture, same unresolved father stuff. No Hot Pockets, no coat closet, no squeezing past the Seaver kids. Just me and a webcam.

The houses couldn't exist. The consequences weren't real. My dad never said the words.

But my kids will never wonder. They get both staircases.

Maybe that's the real comfort—not that everything works out like a sitcom, but that looking back, you can see the dots aligning anyway. The reversals. The timing. The workarounds. All of it leading here. To me giving my kids what we built together, even if the architecture was always impossible.