Sometimes a sitcom comes along that just changes it all – for example, the 1990s to 2000s-era series Fiends. You wouldn’t think they could carry ten whole seasons on the premise that a bunch of young people live with and/or close to each other, meet at a cafe every single day and absolutely hate each other the whole time.
Russ and Raquelle even had one of television’s most famous on-again, off-again relationships and they never once wavered in how much they sincerely hated each other’s guts. Even Monique and Russ, brother and sister, had the occasional plot where they just decided to maliciously undermine each other for no good reason besides spite.
I guess it had other things going for it. I like how at the actual last episode it was revealed that Schindler was a qualified Melbourne bathroom renovation expert for the entire series, without us ever knowing his job. That was supposedly why everyone lived in these swanky, massive apartments. Yeah, Schindler just used his skills in bathroom and laundry renovation to… I don’t know, increase the size of their expensive apartments. Sure, why not? It was a throwaway line, but I believed for years afterwards that renovation conveys upon a place magical properties that let it appear to be much more humongous than it really is. What I’m saying is that the series conferred upon me false ideas of how renovations work, so when I finally bought my first property I expected two things:
- That the person coming to renovate the kitchen would be surly and brimming with hatred for life.
- That the kitchen afterwards would feel like it had quadrupled in size.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the first one was very untrue – none of the qualified kitchen designers Melbourne had to offer seemed anywhere near as cantankerous as Schindler. But the kitchen, while wonderful in every other way, seemed to be the same size. I had to work through that, personally.
It’s a nice kitchen, though.