The funny thing was, in the storyline where they’re actually in L.A., and they’re talking on a payphone and don’t know where they are, they’re actually right outside the studio where the whole series was filmed.
I’ve yet to see a television program set in Pittsburgh that gets things even marginally right. “Queer as Folk” “Heartland” “Three Rivers” “My So-Called Life” “Back to You” and “Hope & Gloria” were all set here, and basic Pittsburgh things that you could find out from the city’s Wikipedia article, even, were constantly butchered or just made entirely irrelevant. Our inclines are funiculars, yes, but they’re never called that, they’re simply the inclines. The interstates that criss-cross the city are called the parkways (east, west and north) not freeways, highways and not “the (number).” (Anytime you hear a roadway outside of California called “the (number)” that’s a sign of a writer who has never lived outside of Los Angeles.) We have neighborhoods, never districts (“Three Rivers” I’m looking at you) and police zones, not precincts, and so on. The new Alyssa Milano sitcom is set here and I have great fear what’s going to get screwed up with that.
Roadhouse, that P.O.S. from Patrick Swayze, was set in Jasper, MO. Jasper is about a 20 minute drive from me and the whole premise of such a place around here is laughable. Of course, to 99.9999% of the population, that doesn’t matter.
Back then it was simply called the First Wisconsin Center while most people called it the First Wisconsin Building. They didn’t add any signage to the buidling until well after I had left town in the late 90s.
An Episode of “Bones” had the main characters visiting Amish country, presumably the one in PA. In a shot of their car driving down a country road you could plainly see the 'bumpy-things-Californians-put-on-the-lane-markers-because-it-never-snows-there". Oops.
This drives me crazy. The Matrix trilogy was set in “The City”, a computer simulation that was an amalgam of a bunch of different cities. It wasn’t set anywhere.
Wikipedia says they added the green sign in 2000. So the movie must have had the green sign, but when Dahmer was active, there wasn’t any sign there.
Not sure if anything could top a Chinatown in Racine, Wisconsin in Bird on a Wire. Ok, maybe the Detroit-Racine ferry.
Actually filmed in Vancouver and its environs…surprise, surprise!
The one that used to drive me crazy was the old Father Dowling series which was supposed to take place in Chicago and it was clearly (for a Coloradan, at least) filmed in Denver. Watch for the foothills of the Rockies in the background, Colorado plates on the cars and Colorado implying names on buildings and vehicles in the backgrounds of many of the scenes.
One I saw just yesterday was NCIS. Tony and Zevia were investigating a storage space in Washington and the Sierra Nevadas were rather prominant in the background.
As I often do, I was looking back at what threads were appealing enough to me a year ago, and two years ago, for me to reply to, when I found one that might be amusing to folks in the thread:
Movies/shows that have presented your location faithfully
was started 04-03-2008, 10:31 AM by Zeldar and ran until 04-07-2008, 05:17 PM when Morbo made the last post.
I won’t even start a new thread on this, but it may make for some fun flashbacks.
The worst was when Monk got amnesia and ended up in Wyoming. Everything from the lush green meadows - to the trees - to the accents - showed the producers/directors/writers knew nothing about my state.
I always thought that shot of the amusement park looked fakey.
I lived in the DC area for 23 years, and it always bugs me that outside of some establishing shots of monuments, shows set in Washington, DC, are really in southern California. I mean, in DC, Virginia, and Maryland, the undeveloped areas are completely greened over. No dry, dusty, back road accessible hills.
in The Stand miniseries, trashcan man is blowing up oil tanks in the midwest. With a huge mountain range behind him.
I don’t know if they ever explicitly said he was living in Detroit proper. I know he was proud of Detroit, etc., but he could very well have lived in the 'burbs. People who live in the burbs of Green Bay here are proud of the Green Bay Packers (and the city as whole), but they still live in the burbs.
People who live in the suburbs of Detroit take pains to make sure people know they don’t live in Detroit proper.
Did the characters ever say that they lived in Detroit? I always assumed that it was a suburb or possibly a suburban-like part of the city (sort of like how Staten Island is to Manhattan).
Speaking of DC: Skyscrapers!Skyscrapers, and news-stands.
Folks, if you’re ever making a film set in DC, please get this right: We have neither. Even food-carts that sell things other than hot-dogs are rare (though this is changing, slowly.) Nicole Kidman’s “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers” remake got all of these wrong, and it’s far from the only offender. Admittedly, there are some modest borderline-skyscrapers in Arlington, right across the Potomac from Georgetown - but the DC skyline looks absolutely nothing like that of NYC, or Vancouver.
Also: Our metro stations have a distinctive sort of Brutalist design. They look as different from NYC subway stations as you can get while still having a platform, tunnels, and all the accoutrements required of a subway station.
I seem to recall Fonzie crashing an airplane in the mountains between Milwaukee and Minneapolis at some point.
Must have been the same southern Minnesota mountain range that appears in the background in Little House on the Prairie…
I don’t recall their exact location being revealed…Wikipedia simply says “suburban Detroit” and that’s all I recall too.