Room for Romance

1 9 9 0 (USA)
5 x 60 minute episodes

An expensive apartment building at 223 East 79th Street on New York City’s fashionable upper east side was the setting for this CBS summer series that resembled a landlocked Love Boat.

Each episode consisted of three separate stories about residents of the building – which had 97 apartments, 167 residents, 32 dogs “and an unknown number of cats” – and jumped from one story to another over the course of the hour.

Everything was seen through the eyes of the building’s nosy and cynical concierge, Roman Carciofi (Dom Irrera), and his precocious but lonely young friend, 10-year-old Caroline Gidot (Rebecca Harrell), who lived in the penthouse with her mother. She talked to him, he talked to the camera.

Little that went on in the building got by them as they observed everyone’s comings and goings and stories dealt with tenants’ love lives and/or family problems.

In the original pilot (which aired as the last episode), Saturday Night Live‘s Don Novello played Aldo Carciofi, though there was no relationship mentioned to Ramon.

Roman Carciofi
Dom Irrera
Caroline Gidot
Rebecca Harrell