I ask him about the show that got him that apartment—the series took a couple of especially shark-jumpy turns in those last few seasons, which Badgley annotated with eyerolls to the press, even as the episodes unfolded.
“I have to bite my tongue there,” he says, then keeps talking. “The end was strange for me, for all of us. Because the characters did all end up together. That has been my problem with television—you start with something real, and it eventually becomes, against all odds, How do these six people still hang out every day? It’s ****ing crazy. It’s impossible. I mean, those six people—why do they even keep hanging out? Because they have to, because they’re on a show. So you start to figure out these asinine ways to keep them all together. Eventually, you have this group of kids circumventing the FBI, dealing with ghosts. And that’s not anyone’s fault. That’s not the writers’ fault. It’s just the nature of television. And that’s why after so many years of working in it, I was, Seriously? I cannot do this anymore.