I read in The Guardian (UK) the other day that regional comedy and drama shows attract a bigger proportion of their audience from the region they depict than the UK national average. IE a popular comedy set in Manchester will attract a bigger share of the audience in Manchester and its environs than elsewhere.
Is this true of US TV drama and comedy? I watched Cold Case earlier and it is set in Philadelphia. Do more Philadelphians watch it proportionally than those in other regions? Does region matter in US TV? Do these shows include regionalisms that would be lost on those from elsewhere?
What about a show like The Wire, set in Baltimore or The Drew Carey Show, set in Cleveland?
Link to the article.
I don’t have any statistics, but I would guess in most cases it makes very little difference. Most shows are aimed at a national market, or at non-region-specifc cultural groups. The only exception I can think of would be for shows set in the south: I wouldn’t be surprised if ratings for things like “The Andy Griffith Show” or “Designing Women” or “Mama’s Family” were higher in the South than elsewhere.
But maybe I’m wrong – I don’t live in an area where any big TV shows are (or as far as I know, ever have been) set. How about those of you from Cleveland/Philly/Baltimore/etc., where major shows are set? Do you seek out your local shows? (I’m excluding New York and LA from this list, as 9/10 of TV shows seem to take place in one of those two cities.)
The Sopranos seems to be much more popular in New Jersey than nationally. (I’m a New Jersey native currently attending college in the Bay Area, FWIW - just my anecdotal experience.)
I doubt it - for instance, CSI (the original with stories from Las Vegas) is actually filmed in Los Angeles, but supposedly takes place here in LV, yet the show is a hit nationwide. Most Las Vegans chuckle when they watch it as usually it is quite obvious the scenes were not filmed here (landscape, street styles, etc.).
The same goes for the series Las Vegas - also filmed in Los Angeles. So I guess people realize that even though the show might be set in a different location (Boston Legal for instance) they are mostly filmed in LA and it doesn’t really matter.
Now, if you were to tell me the Harry Potter films were not actually filmed at Hogwarts Castle, well, then I would truly be crushed.
Yeah I was thinking they’re all filmed in LA somewhere so It mightn’t much matter.
Seems like almost every US tv show is filmed in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, or Vancouver.
What I didn’t understand until I got out here is just how many LA in-jokes are put into TV and films produced here.
One example that pops into mind: I saw LA Confidential shortly after I moved out here. There’s an extremely brief scene where they show the groundbreaking of the Santa Monica Freeway (now the westernmost portion of Interstate 10). A man is making a sort of proclamation to a small crowd that includes something along the lines of “from downtown to the seashore in 20 minutes!”
To anyone else, it’s simply a brief scene in a montage, helping set the time and place for this period crime drama. To Angelenos, it’s a laugh riot. The I-10 westbound being the very heavily used road that it is, getting anywhere on it in 20 minutes, other than about 500 yards from where you were 20 minutes earlier, is patently absurd.
I saw a screening of the film when I worked at the film studio in LA - and trust me when I say the LA audience guffawed at that line.
Miami Vice of course was the king of incorporating on-location footage and, I understand, was super popular there. Northern Exposure filmed on location in Roslyn, Washington (the town portrayed as Cicely, Alaska) and while I’ve no idea if this helped it’s popularity in the northwest it certainly made it popular in the rest of the country for the sense of authenticity (especially important since the show was so surreal). Dallas used to film a few scenes each year in Texas and then intersplice the location shots through the year, then the rest was filmed on Hollywood sets, but that did help the realism. Most shows, however, have a near total disconnect between where they’re set and the plotlines and characterizations.
Designing Women was set in Atlanta and definitely had a southern theme and they’d make reference to the High Museum or Stone Mountain or Lennox Mall and other Atlanta landmarks, but I don’t believe an episode was ever filmed there and they could as easily have been in Charleston or Nashville or any other southern city. Even so, it was popular in the South because it showed southerners as eccentric, perhaps, but intelligent, cultured, etc., one of the few sitcoms to do so since Andy Griffith (where some characters were stupid but they also drove modern cars and watched television and had nice houses, etc., and weren’t Li’l Abner stereotypes).
Most US shows don’t even go that far. For example, That 70s Show and Happy Days were both set in Milwaukee but may as well have been set in Dover, Delaware or Jersey City, NJ for all the difference it made to the plots, accents, etc… (A friend of mine from Milwaukee said her school used to joke about "how is it they found all these Italians in Milwaukee- Fonzarelli, DeFazio, Arcola, Delvecchio, etc.- but they can’t seem to find any Poles or Germans or E. Europeans?)
Even Little House on the Prairie, a huge hit where there was certainly enough budget to film anywhere Landon wanted to, was filmed solely in Hollywood. Consequently the show lasted for more than a decade (under various names) and was set in Minnesota, but there were steep hills in the background and it snowed twice in that decade.
Frasier was set in Seattle and there were some episodes filmed on location. You could tell them because no matter where they were supposed to be plotwise you could see the Space Needle.
Shows sometimes even seem to forget where they’re filmed. Alice, for example, was set in a greasy spoon diner in Phoenix, AZ, but for some reason or other Telly Savales, Art Carney, George Burns and other celebrities stopped by and the local Phoenix TV station produced a big budget game show in a couple of plots (quite unusual for local networks). Murphy Brown was set in Washington D.C., which made perfect sense for a TV news show, but for some odd reason the head of the network (played by Garry Marshall, producer of Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and lots of other bad shows and movies, but hysterical as a character actor) was also in D.C., and thereagain the only D.C. footage was stock footage during transitions.
So generally, where it’s set is trivial.
Cold Case makes some effort to get the local color right. Philly is very much a city of neighborhoods, and a story set in Mantua would have a different flavor than one set in Manayunk, to say nothing of the subtle distinctions between Fishtown, Brewerytown, and Nicetown. The writers of the show have some familiarity with the socio-economic distinctions, though I’m not going to say they always get it exactly right.
It’s mostly shot in L.A., but they do some exteriors in Philly, which is always fun for me.
Every planet in the original 60s Star Trek looked either like a reused sound stage or a Southern California park or a nearby desert. :dubious:
I know, how much could it possibley have cost to film on location? 
The Six-Million Dollar Man is another show of (more or less) that era that didn’t bother to try to make Southern California look like anyplace else.
Movies screw up too. Often it’s very minor things that would never occur to someone who isn’t from where the film is set. Like Land of the Dead. Although the city’s name wasn’t mentioned it’s implied to be Pittsburgh. The town where they’re scavenging at the begining was named onscreen, Uniontown. Cholo raids a liquor store and steals from a cigar display. Any Pennsylvanian can tell you what’s wrong with that picture.
I believe the answer is one of those “it depends” things.
If the show is broadcast over the main networks that serve the entire country, then whatever regional variations there are in viewership are more likely to depend on non-regional factors like age, level of sophistication, specific demographic being targeted, etc. Regional variations, if any, will derive from those regional emphases mentioned in the OP. A good example would be American Idol where one or more of the stronger contestants has a strong regional following. Ruben Studdard and Bo Bice, for instance, had huge Alabama followings to the point of being media darlings there.
With those exceptions noted, I suspect the other shows that would have more obvious regional followings would be the ones produced in the region for primary showing in the region. There are many such shows on cable, but they are not meant for nationwide distribution. Nashville is one of the “less major” markets (as compared to New York and Los Angeles) that produces shows of both types. There are music and comedy shows that are meant for Southern audiences that probably aren’t even available outside the South.
A now-defunct show that was a Nashville production that did have wide appeal was Hee Haw and there have been others of that type from time to time.
Another obvious example would be pro sports broadcasts. CBS and Fox carry pro football and will have the teams in various regions selected for that region’s viewing – unless that region’s attendance at the games is low enough to cause a blackout of the team in that region. Other areas outside the blackout region can see the game if it’s available through their market. But the CBS lineup on any given Sunday will have as many as four concurrent broadcasts, each of which is for a specific region of the country.
So, as I said, it depends.
Sounds like the scene in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” where Bob Hoskins scoiffs, “Why would anybody want a car? Los Angeles has the best public transportation system in the world.”
In addition to many of these shows being shot in the same places many of the writers live in Southern California. It’s hard to come up with authentic regional references to a place you have never been.
I remember several times during Cheers there would be casual references to characters parking outside the bar, and Sam parked his car behind the bar all the time. In fact parking is extremely difficult in many parts of Boston, no more so than Beacon Hill where the bar was supposed to be. If I were setting out there to have a few beers there I certainly wouldn’t drive, I would walk or take the subway.
(If you did happen to drive and were so lucky as to get a space right outside the bar you would run in and tell all your friends, then go outside to show them, and maybe take pictures.)
I don’t think TV producers particularly care by the way, they are usually trying to appeal to the biggest possible audience. Most Americans are used to watching shows made in LA, by people who live there.
I’ve read a couple of articles about how everyone here in NYC watches Law & Order (and its various spin-offs). I know for me, it’s fun to see a show that actually cares about the geography of the city. If they say “he worked at a store on Stanton and Ludlow,” then they film right on that corner. And then they’ll say that he “lives in an apartment six blocks away,” and film on a street six blocks away.
It really adds to the realism, and it’s just nice to see a show set in New York that doesn’t occasionally show a palm tree or the CN Tower in the background.
Because in the 70s only Italians and Jews from New York and New Jersey were considered funny, and you couldn’t call Jews Jews because of, I dunno, All in the Family or somedamnthing, so they could only be writers, and also Blacks had to have separate shows, I think also due to AITF.