Residences on famous television shows can become very familiar. Yet, these places do not always match reality. On Seinfeld, Jerry’s apartment appears to have some discrepancies with how his apartment building is depicted:

Reddit user PixelMagic has revealed (in a post we first came across at Indy100) the dark lie of Seinfeld. Jerry’s home can’t exist in the real world. Not if you believe in basic rules of time and space. You can see why in an overhead rendering of the apartment. If you actually built it to these specifications, the outside hall would need to run through Jerry’s kitchen.

Your instinct might be to say the hallway must have been curved. That was my first reaction. Lots of other Reddit users said the same thing too. If you look at screenshots of certain episodes, that does seem plausible. In certain moments the area between Jerry and Kramer’s apartments seems small enough that it could form a little cove. As you walk away from Jerry’s door, the hall could bend away from the kitchen.

But once again, “The Strongbox” is here to ruin Jerry’s life. That was the episode when Jerry kept inadvertently torturing his building mate Phil. Poor Phil owned a parrot that choked to death on the strongbox key Kramer hid in his food dish.

As PixelMagic showed, that episode provides indisputable evidence that Jerry’s hall did not curve away from his door.

This is a common issue on television shows. For example, see earlier posts about the Brady Bunch house or the apartment on Friends and other shows depicting young people living it up in the city. The primary focus on shows is to provide a home environment that works for the characters and filming, not necessarily one that fits reality or spaces common seen in these locations.

At the same time, consistent hiccups between what is depicted and what is actually possible can create issues down the road for viewers. Even if those watching to not consciously spend time dwelling on the physical spaces of a show or start drawing up floor plans to explore the particulars, spending all of those hours watching Seinfeld could shape how one views apartments and cities. Is this how people live in apartments? Is this what New York City is really like?