Hi Chris,
I never thought about it this way but you are right, there is a feeling of knowing those characters and their places intimately. It's like an extra room in one's brain where one goes to relax and look at life from the side and laugh a little (at the episode but also at oneself).
I don't have much to add at the moment, except that there is a feeling of complete safety in those places, more so than in one's own apartment or usual hang-out places. I guess the reason is that it is safer to be a spectator than an actor.

I was just listening to a cd and the following song played, and I immediately thought of your post Chris:




Our memories belong to us, and can't be taken from us (well, according to the song. In movies such as Men in Black there are tools for it.) When you look at a painting it has an effect, an effect which stays with you. The people who go to museums and when they see something they like they want to buy it, and imagine it in their living room, they want to physically own it, these are not the more advanced viewers.It would be nice to have a Picasso at home, but I can't have all the great paintings in the world in my house, so I use my memory to appropriate them. I loan them so to say, while at the same time others can loan them too. The Virtual has gotten a bad rap because of the internet but in fact art is based on the virtual - you go to the theater and believe in the scenery, you watch a movie or read a book and believe in the fiction. You accept the virtual and through memory you appropriate it to your own life.

The physical - that's only a very partial part of our lives. Even in the most minute details of the physical objects around us, they are loaded with a virtual meaning we put on them. When we see a gun we don't only see a gun, we see a gun from all the movies and theater plays we saw. In fact, often the difficulty is not in having your physical world impregnated by the virtual one, but how to live and not try to imitate a virtual world which puts possibly false assumptions on the way the world is. Seeing and reading more possibilities helps in opening your eyes to different, previously invisible, options.

Julie, I like your  extra room metaphor, but I wonder how well can we separate what really happened to us and the events of these TV series. We can partially separate them, but it's perhaps a studio apartment with only a narrow screen separating the two parts, rather than two clearly separate rooms.