While pop culture has regularly questioned how Monica and Rachel on Friends could afford such an incredibly nice New York apartment, the same has never really been the case for Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld. It's established in the seventh season two-parter "The Cadillac" that the TV character's comedy career is legitimately lucrative, and that goes a long way in explaining how he could pay rent on his Upper West Side pad. But while that's never been a mystery, fans have apparently only now discovered that the floor plan of Jerry's place doesn't really make any sense.
This has become a topic of conversation among fans because of a post on the Seinfeld subreddit on Reddit. A user posted a 3D rendering of the famous apartment (minus Jerry's bedroom), and pointed out that the location of the kitchen intersects with what should be the location of the hallway. Check it out for yourself below:
from r/seinfeld
Some of you may now be thinking to yourselves, "Well, duh – there's just a corner in the hallway." The problem with this idea is that the show features multiple scenes in that hallway, and at some points it is even looks like there is a door behind Jerry's refrigerator. Take, for example, this screenshot from the Season 2 episode "The Apartment":
Of course, the reasoning behind this "mistake" isn't exactly rocket science. TV show leads tend to have large apartments because it allows for a lot of space for characters to move through, and it allows for the capacity of getting a lot of different angles. On these kinds of sets, practicality trumps logic. Hence, while the shape of Jerry's apartment would suggest a dog leg turn directly to the right of his front door, that would be a terrifically annoying space to shoot in, so the production team opted to bend reality a bit and make the hallway straight and wide.
Is it a flaw? You could call it that. But to the show's credit, there are multiple other examples where its history demonstrates a smart attention to detail. One of my favorite behind-the-scenes stories about Seinfeld is that co-creator Larry David requested reshoots of the Season 4 episode "The Handicap Spot" after Frank Costanza was recast with Jerry Stiller (RIP) in Season 5, as David was concerned about confusion when the episode played in syndication (similarly, he had Wayne Knight re-record the Newman dialogue in Season 2's "The Revenge," as David himself originally performed the voice-only role in the episode).
All that being said, I've been a Seinfeld fanatic for almost my entire life and never noticed the oddness with the hallway, so I offer a big thumbs up to Reddit user PixelMagic for the realization.
