I was watching Felicity the other day. Why are you giving me that look? It’s not like I was watching The Babysitter’s Seduction, a made-for-TV movie starring a 19-year-old Keri Russell as the innocent babysitter bedded by the creepy widower, portrayed effortlessly by that guy who now plays the father on 7th Heaven. Especially since said movie was playing on Lifetime, which doesn’t even come in clearly on my television, and do I really seem like the kind of person who would waste an hour of her life squirming uncomfortably as a blurry Reverend Camden lures an equally-blurry teenage girl into the bed still warm from the body of his suspiciously dead wife?

What’s that? I seem like exactly that kind of person? Let’s move on.

As I was watching Felicity, I inevitably began to reminisce about the first time I had seen it: it was ninth grade, when graduation still loomed comfortably on the horizon. I didn’t know any college students, nor had I ever been on a college campus — in fact, everything I knew about college I had learned from watching melodramatic TV shows aimed at ninth graders.

Gleaning information about college life from teen dramas is, of course, only slightly more accurate than learning about astronomy from Star Trek. In ninth grade nothing struck me as unusual about Felicity being able to foot her entire tuition bill with a barista job, but now, years older and wiser, I’ve come to realize the extreme inaccuracies upheld by three popular portrayals of campus life: Felicity’s “University of New York,” Saved by the Bell: The College Years‘ “California University,” and Gilmore Girls‘ “Yale.” What follows are the trademark — yet blatantly mistaken — characteristics of TV college.

The Capacious Dorm Room.
Apparently the colleges that appear on television have suffered such high attrition rates that they can cordon off entire corridors to act as doubles. This is surely because the dorm room is the backdrop for most scenes; if the sets were a more realistic size, episodes would have titles like “Rory Struggles to Make Her Bed” and “Felicity Stubs Her Toe, Yet Again, on the Corner of the Goddamn Dresser, No Seriously, it May Be Broken, Look, the Nail is Turning Black.”

Zack’s triple is roughly the size of my entire apartment, while Felicity’s more modestly-sized double is able to accommodate two sets of furniture along with innumerable fuzzy sweaters. Rory’s suite has a spacious common room with vaulted ceilings and, I’m quite sure, flying buttresses. It’s important to note that no main characters on television ever live in a single. This is due to the indispensable nature of …

The Quirky Roommate.
Every main character needs a foil, and in college that foil usually comes in the form of a crazy roommate. Either she wears goth makeup, practices Wicca, and keeps her underwear in the refrigerator, or she lacks any social skills whatsoever and has more neuroses than Freud’s Rat Man. Or, in Zack’s case, one roommate is a lovable-yet-socially-retarded geek and the other one has pecs the size of Vermont and always enters the room to the feverish squeals of prepubescent females. I believe Heloise recommends mothballs to get rid of those pesky studio audiences that just won’t leave. Wacky hallmates are also around to provide comic relief, but none are so important as …

The Older, Wiser R.A.
In some cases, much, much older; consider Zack’s 40-year-old, mullet-headed resident advisor, whom I at first mistook for a janitor. But even when an R.A. isn’t old enough to have questionable motives, he’s still omnipresent, omniscient, and involved in the lives of his residents. In the case of Felicity’s Noel, this involvement transcends the normal bounds of an advisor/resident relationship and blossoms into a romantic coupling. Okay, maybe you don’t have to be 40 to have questionable motives.

I’ve never had a late-night heart-to-heart with an R.A.. In fact, last year I saw my R.A. a grand total of once, and that was only because he was watching a basketball game in the common room of another dorm, which I coincidentally happened to be in. It’s a good thing I didn’t need his advice on …

The Completely Unrealistic Classroom Environment.
In which the professor knows everyone by name and the students sit in rapt attention. The class usually has some nebulous, overarching title, like “Shakespeare” or “Math,” and the professor speaks in sound-bites that seem really profound, provided you know nothing about the topic.

There are no mediocre professors on television — only brilliant, inspirational ones who double as parental figures, and sour old hags whose only joy in life is being cruel to helpless students. Either type can be involved in …

The Illicit Professor/Student Romance.
It is an inexorable fact that a secondary character will become romantically intertwined with an instructor. It will never end well. The heartbroken student can then drown his or her woes at the next …

Party? At least, they call it a party. More often than not it’s hosted by the R.A. in the dorm, or people are sitting around sipping Pepsi, or the frat guys are wearing pastel V-neck sweaters over turtlenecks.

Interesting that while most of the minutiae of college life — the roommate spats, the misplaced textbooks, the occasional all-nighter in the library — are inflated to ridiculous proportions, the party scene is reduced to a mere plot device and an excuse to have The Shins play a song or two. Is it possible that the writers are trying to avoid sensationalizing college, instead attempting to depict it as a place for edification and self-improvement?

After watching Saved by the Bell, the more likely answer seems to be that the writers never actually went to college themselves.