All the furnishings were curated from the current trends in interior design magazines. “For example, the dumbwaiter didn’t exist in the real house. “Our alterations were script driven,” production designer Kristi Zea told AD. There was no dumbwaiter in the actual home There’s no record of what exactly this letter said because they threw it away “without much thought,” per The Cut’s article, but Andrea Woods remembers it mentioning a long period observing the home as well. The Woods family, who owned the home for 23 years before selling to the Broadduses, received a letter from the Watcher a few days before moving out. Photo: courtesy of Netflix The previous owners received their own letter The exterior of the Rye, New York, home featured in The Watcher. In the affluent suburb, Boulevard is known for its especially beautiful houses. The Cape Cod–style TV home is located in Rye, New York, but the show is still set in Westfield and uses the real address of the Broaddus family’s former home. Many of the minor details were changed for the TV show at the request of the real homeowners-Derek and Maria Broaddus became Dean and Nora Brannock (played by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts, respectively), and the show wasn’t filmed at the real-life traditional-style Westfield, New Jersey, house where it all went down. And before you ask, no, the real family did not have a pet ferret. Below, we touch on seven facts about the real home and whether or not the TV show stayed faithful to reality. “The Watcher is a story about fear and greed set inside an ostentatious, overblown, faux 20th century mansion inhabited by a variety of lost souls both living and ‘dead.’ The house is certainly the main character and that’s what attracted me to the series,” Kristi Zea, the show’s production designer, tells AD.

The Watcher by W.J. Davies