Living in New York City Trivia Quiz

Answer: I Love Lucy

Originally airing between 1951 and 1957, the show was set in an apartment building in New York (at a fictitious address on East 68th Street that would actually have been in the middle of the East River) for most of the time, but the Ricardos moved to Connecticut in the final season. The show follows the efforts of the ditzy Lucy (Lucille Ball) to participate in the show business life of her band-leader husband, Ricky (Desi Arnaz). She is assisted by her best friend and landlady, Ethel (Vivian Vance), who lives in one of the apartments below with her husband Fred (William Frawley). Since Ethel is a former model, and Fred an ex-vaudevillian, Lucy often finds herself feeling on the outside of their jokes and reminiscences.

Lucille Ball ruled the show, and became known as one of the comedic greats of her time. 'I Love Lucy' was followed by 'The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show' (1957-1960), 'The Lucy Show' (1962-1968) and 'Here's Lucy' (1968-1974).

Answer: The Honeymooners

Given the iconic status of this show in the history of American television, it is surprising to learn that there were only 39 episodes filmed, originally aired between October 1955 and September 1956. Set in a distinctly run-down apartment in Brooklyn, it was one of the first shows to portray the lives of working class couples whose relationships were less than idyllic. Bus driver Ralph (Jackie Gleason) and sewer worker Ed (Art Carney), neighbors and best friends, generally seem to converse by exchanging insults, mostly coming from Ralph, and often ending with Ed's being expelled from the apartment.. Ralph's temper is also frequently displayed in his interactions with Alice (played by Audrey Meadows for all but the first few episodes), who gives as good as she gets in their verbal exchanges. Trixie, who was not seen as often as the other three characters, was played by several different actresses during the series.

In the sketches on 'The Jackie Gleason Show' that eventually developed into the series, she was portrayed by Elaine Stritch as an ex-burlesque dancer; the character was modified to be a more mundane and wholesome housewife.

Answer: All in the Family

Inspired by the BBC show 'Till Death Do Us Part', 'All in the Family' centred on irascible and bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), who gave the show's writers plenty of opportunity to introduce topical issues so that he could rant about them. His household in Queens included his sweet, but rather dim, wife Edith (Jean Stapleton), their feminist daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and her husband Michael (Rob Reiner), who was generally called Meathead by his father-in-law. The show's theme song, 'Those Were the Days', captures Archie's view that the world used to be much better, when everyone was like him, and things were nicely predictable. Unfortunately for him, the time in which he lived (the show ran from 1971-1979) was one of major social change, which he found difficult.

This series introduced a number of characters who later got their own shows: Edith's cousin Maude (Bea Arthur) got her own eponymous show in 1972, after only two appearances on 'All in the Family', while the Bunkers' African-American neighbors, with whom Archie frequently squabbled, moved on to 'The Jeffersons'.

Answer: Welcome Back Kotter

While the series is ostensibly centred on Gabe Kotter (Gabe Kaplan), a teacher who returns to the Brooklyn high school where he had been a student in order to take on the challenge of teaching a group of remedial students derisively called 'Sweathogs', it is the students who actually stole most of the attention. Vinnie Barbarino, an Italian-American chick magnet who is the acknowledged leader of the group, was the breakthrough role for John Travolta. Arnold Horshack, played by Ron Palillo, was the class clown, whose wheezy laugh often sounded in appreciation of one of his own antics.

The basketball-playing 'Boom Boom' Washington, so called because of the sounds he made while performing on air bass guitar, was played by Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs. Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Einstein, a Puerto Rican Jew played by Robert Hegyes, was known both for his feisty attitude and for his fake excuse notes, signed "Epstein's Mother".

These four were accompanied by a number of recurring and incidental characters through the series, which originally ran from 1975 to 1979.

Answer: Seinfeld

This 'show about nothing', based on a fictionalised version of Jerry Seinfeld (and with a character who seems suspiciously like the co-creator of the show, Larry David) managed to make us laugh even as we cringed over the incredibly self-obsessed behaviour of the central characters.

Originally running from 1989 to 1998, it contributed a number of phrases to the popular vernacular, including 'yada, yada, yada', 'no soup for you' and 'not that there's anything wrong with that'. Then there was the episode that introduced us to the wonderful non-holiday that is Festivus.

While we don't know exactly where Jerry's apartment is located, it can be placed somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by a number of references during the show. Jerry (played by himself), ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), high school friend George (Jason Alexander), and Kramer (Michael Richards), who lives across the hall from Jerry, manage to work themselves up over trivialities that we all recognise, such as finding your car in the vast desert of sameness that is a shopping-centre parking lot.

Answer: Law and Order

Since this series ran from 1990 until 2010, and had a lot of cast changes over those years, I may not have chosen the characters that you remember most clearly, as you may not have been a fan then. Mike Logan (Chris Noth) was one of the original police detectives in Manhattan's 27th Precinct, and Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty) was the first Executive Assistant District Attorney. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) was a detective for season three through fourteen (when he had to leave the show due to ill health), and Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) was Executive ADA, later District Attorney, for seasons five through twenty.

The hour-long shows had a standard format in which the first half of the show followed the police officers tracking down the perpetrator of the crime we saw in the opening sequence, and the second half showed the attempts of the prosecuting team to gain a conviction. Stories were often based on real-life events - you could tell how recent and high-profile the event was by the wording of the show's introductory statement that no real people or events are being portrayed.

Answer: Mad About You

Jamie (Helen Hunt) and Paul (Paul Reiser) start the show, which as newlyweds, living in Union Square, coping with the major and minor issues involved in the transition into married life. He was an independent filmmaker, specialising in documentaries, and she worked in public relations. Paul was walking his collie-cross Murray when the couple met, and Murray featured prominently in a number of episodes - and it turns out that the mouse he kept chasing as he ran headlong into the apartment wall was real, after all.

The other members of their families all had their comic foibles: Jamie's sister Lisa (Anne Ramsay) had more than most, and frequently ended up visiting her sister. Among other memorable recurring characters, Lisa Kudrow played Ursula Buffay (identical twin to Phoebe Buffay of 'Friends' fame), a hopelessly forgetful waitress, in 24 episodes.

The character provided the link for a number of crossover episodes between the two series, which were both on air at that time: 'Mad About You' originally aired from 1992 to 1999, and 'Friends' started in 1994, on the same network and the same evening.

Answer: Friends

There are six central members of 'Friends', whose lives are a shared mess of (mostly) comedy and (occasionally) drama, but these four form the two most significant romantic relationships in the group. Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Monica (Courtney Cox) were schoolmates, and they join forces when Rachel runs out on her wedding. Monica's brother Ross (David Schwimmer) has long had a crush on Rachel, and the two do finally get together by the end of the show, after one of the longest on again-off again relationships in television history (over the ten years from 1994 to 2004).

The other members of the group include Chandler (Matthew Perry), who eventually marries Monica; Joey (Matt LeBlanc), an unemployed actor with a talent for gaining interesting roommates; and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), whose musical performances in the Manhattan cafe where the group often gather provide a touch of almost surreal humour.

Answer: Spin City

Moderately-incompetent NYC mayor Randall Winston (Barry Bostwick) depended heavily on his deputy mayor, Mike Flaherty (Michael J. Fox) to keep the city from falling apart. Other members of the staff included press secretary Paul Lassiter (Richard Kind), chief of staff Stuart Bondek (Alan Ruck), the head of minority affairs, Carter Heywood (Michael Boatman) and speech writer James Hobert (Alexander Chaplin). Aside from the comedy generated by the mayor's ineptitude, the office relationships between the cheapskate Paul, the naïve James, the sexist ladies-man Stuart, and the gay Carter (not to mention his suicidal dog Rags) as they cope with their jobs allows plenty of humorous situations.

The show first aired in 1996; in 1998, when Michael Fox announced that he had Parkinson's, the show provided an assistant for him, Caitlin Moore (Heather Locklear), who stayed on in the role when Fox resigned in 2000 and a new deputy mayor arrived, Charlie Crawford (Charlie Sheen), who remained until the show ended in 2002.

Answer: The King of Queens

Doug Heffernan (Kevin James) is a smart-aleck courier driver, married to sharp-tongued Carrie (Leah Remini), whose widowed father Arthur (Jerry Stiller) lives in their basement, having burned down his own home in the pilot episode. Doug's best friend his his workmate Deacon (Victor Williams), who sometimes helps Doug in his hare-brained schemes, and sometimes offers the more mature advice that it seems like a bad idea.

The show clearly draws some of its inspiration from 'The Honeymooners', a source which is made clear in the episode 'Inner Tube', in which the three central characters become Ralph, Alice and Ed in a dream sequence that is shot in black and white. 'The King of Queens' first went to air in 1998; when it finished in 2007 it was the last of the live action American sitcoms that started in the 1990s to come to an end.