The formal living room — kept clean, rarely entered, holding the good china and the furniture nobody sits on — was once a fixture of American domestic life. In this episode, we trace what happened to the performative spaces in our homes, and what their disappearance reveals about how we've stopped rehearsing for a version of ourselves we no longer believe in. It's a story about aspiration, audience, and what we're actually saying when we decide every room should be 'lived in.'