Recently, we’ve started watching 666 Park, mostly because we like to fantasize that we live rent free in a spacious two-bedroom on Park Avenue. Also, once in a while, when we’re feeling lazy, we like to fantasize that a hard day of work would involve a little light reading at the library, mulling for 30 minutes or so over some blueprints, visiting the basement 10 to 15 times for no real reason whatsoever and a leisurely lunch at a very expensive restaurant.
But when we cut away for the umpteenth time to the exterior of the Ansonia, it’s just too hard to ignore the fact that it would take an act of god (or the devil) to relocate the Ansonia to the Upper East Side and our thoughts return, as they always do, to real estate. Some of the real estate-related thoughts we had on viewing the most recent episode:
An extra room in the basement!? That’s amazing. What a dream come true. I wonder how much that would rent for.
How does an up-and-coming journalist afford to live in the building? They don’t even bother to stick in an obligatory reference to her grandmother’s rent control. I mean, that’s just bad writing. I could suspend my disbelief for the playwright and the photographer, but this is too much.
Now that I think of it, everyone who rents in the building appears to be middle class. How do they get these apartments before they sell their souls?
Someone wants to break their lease in the building? That’s even more unbelievable than a Beaux Arts building constructed in the 1920s.
I thought you got seven years between the time you sold your soul and the devil came to claim it. The journalist didn’t even get a night off work. What the hell? Writers are always signing terrible contracts.
I’ll admit, the little girl ghost is creepy, but not the worst I’ve ever seen. (That honor goes to The Ring.) Plus, it’s an old building. What old building doesn’t have creaks, drafts, a few child ghosts?
Please tell me we’re not going to go back to the basement again. I wish we spent more time in the penthouse. I mean, we don’t even know if it’s a floor-through or a duplex. And the owner may be the Devil, so it could be a floor-through triplex for all we know!
kvelsey@observer.com