Much obliged.
Here’s a sorted lost of the shows named through Post #81 Today, 09:22 AM
The dupes (as best I could do) have been removed except for the shows where I don’t know enough to select the right “location.”
I would appreciate any help in putting the 80+ shows in some categories to make polling easier or more logical.
Until there’s a way to cope with the number in more meaningful bites, I’m waiting for help.
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All in the Family – Astoria (NYC?)
Always Sunny in Philadelphia – “Philly”
The Andy Griffith Show – North Carolina, specifically, Mount Airy, NC
Blue Bloods – NYC
The Bob Newhart Show – Chicago
Bones – Washington, DC
Breaking Bad – Desert Southwest (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Burn Notice – Miami
Cheers – Boston
Chicago Code – Chicago
Chicago Hope – Chicago
Corner Gas – Saskatchewan
Coronation Street – Manchester
CSI – Las Vegas
Dallas – Dallas
Detroit 1-8-7 – Detroit
Dexter – Miami
Dragnet (the 50s and 60s versions) – Los Angeles
The Drew Carey Show – Cleveland
ER – Chicago
Family Ties – Ohio, with references to both Cincinnati and Cleveland
Frasier – Seattle
Friday Night Lights – West Texas
Friday Night Lights – Midland/Odessa Texas
Friends – NYC
Green Acres – Hooterville
Gunsmoke – western
Happy Days – Milwaukee
Happy Endings – Chicago
Hawaii 5-0 – Hawaii
Home Improvement – metro Detroit
Homicide: Life on the Streets – Baltimore
The Honeymooners – Bensonhurt, Brooklyn, in the Fifties
Hot in Cleveland – Cleveland
How I met Your Mother – NYC
How I Met Your Mother – could have been any big city
In Plain Sight – Albuquerque
Justified – Kentucky
The Killing – Seattle
King of the Hill – North Texas/Houston/Austin/general Texas
King of the Hill – Central Texas (within an hour of Austin – somewhere just north of it)
King Of The Hill – Houston Suburbs – Richardson, TX, a suburb of Dallas
Laverne & Shirley – Milwaukee
Law & Order (the original) – NYC
Life on Mars – Manchester (England)
Little House on the Prairie – western
Louie - New York
Mad Men – NYC
Magnum, P.I. – Hawaii
MAS*H – the mountains around southern California
The Mentalist – different locations over a large area of California
Miami Vice – Miami
The Middle – Indiana
Mike & Molly – Chicago
Mork & Mindy – Denver
Mork and Mindy – Boulder
My Name is Earl – Camden County (unincorporated area or something)(loosely based on Waldorf, Maryland)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 – Twin Cities (Minnesota?)
Nash Bridges – San Francisco
Northern Exposure – Alaska
NYPD Blue – NYC
The Office – Scranton, Pa.
parks and rec – pawnee
Petticoat Junction – Hooterville
Portlandia – Oregon
Rawhide – western
The Red Riding trilogy - Leeds, West Yorkshire
Rescue Me – NYC
Rhoda – NYC
Roseanne – Michigan
Roseanne – in the rust belt somewhere
Roseanne – Lanford, IL – generic Midwest
Roseanne – Illinois, not Michigan
Royal Pains – the Hamptons
Saturday Night Live – NYC
Seinfeld – NYC
The Simpsons – the State that Springfield is in
Six Feet Under – LA
The Sopranos – New Jersey
Southland – LA
Spin City – NYC
Streets of San Francisco – SF
That 70s Show – Small Town, USA – Point Place, WI, was in fact inspired by Dunkirk, NY
30Rock – NYC
Twin Peaks – Pacific Northwest
Wagon Train – western
The Waltons – Appalachian mountains of Virginia
Whitney – chicago
Will and Grace – NYC
Wings – Nantucket (The island and, to a lesser extent, coastal Massachusetts)
The Wire – Baltimore
WKRP – some level of Cincinnati/Ohio references
Trailer Park Boys – the Maritimes
I thought The Rockford Files definitely captured part of what defined Southern California in the Seventies.
"Law and Order was not only set in NYC, it was pretty much filmed on location there.
On the other hand, “Designing Women” was set in Atlanta, and I never got any sense of Atlanta from that show.
The Beverly Hillbillies 
I agree. New York and LA are usually just used to add plausibility and “realness” to a show - and LA is a distant second, mostly in shows where showbiz is looking at itself.
It’s all probably intended to go down easy with media industry people. For many, NY/LA simply is the real world, with NY realest of all.
There’s a lot of truth to his but for me, the characters scream New York which over shadows everything else.
I thought The West Wing nailed DC in a way that 227 and The District didn’t. There have been some other DC-set shows that really dropped the ball, the most notorious being Wonder Woman (No palm trees line Massachusetts Avenue). NCIS occasionally surprises me with convincing settings in the Virginia suburbs. The X-Files rarely did; I couldn’t think of a single building in Takoma Park that could house the Lone Gunmen’s HQ. Murphy Brown got DC pretty well. That’s My Bush did not.
I enjoyed Newhart a lot, but wonder if any Vermonters recognized themselves among those odd characters. I did like the witches’ coven his wife accidentally joined that one time (“If you wanna be a witch, ya gotta marry the devil!”).
Seattle had a wonderful sketch comedy show 20-odd years ago called Almost Live which not only caught the vibe of the city, but skewered specific neighborhoods and suburbs pretty deftly. It was kind of the Portlandia of its day. The show was briefly repackaged for Comedy Central, but all the regionalisms were bleached out of it and a lot of viewers had to wonder what the big deal was. At least Bill Nye, Science Guy spun off of it.
SCTV sure had a regional sense, though I guess it’s a little patronizing to call Canada a “region.”
Also: What was Archie’s ethnicity? You might say Irish because of O’Connor. And the character’s accent and xenophobia ring true with the workingclass Irish stereotype. But he bitched about the Micks and Catlickers right along with everybody else he bitched about.
Another show set in New York, but not admitting it, was Laverne and Shirley, which took place in either the Milwaukee section of Brooklyn or the Brooklyn section of Milwaukee.
It think it could easily have been set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis. The exterior establishment shot of the network building was definitely not in Washington, D.C.
Well, the show was created by Garry Marshall, an Italian-American from Chicago… but Garry cut his teeth in show biz writing jokes for Jewish Borscht Belt comics like Phil Foster (he repaid Foster years later by giving him the role of Laverne’s Dad). Hence, even when Marshall’s shows are set in the Midwest, they ofen have an unmistakeably New York Jewish feel.
That’s a very fair point. The anti-Catholic jokes MAY have been a carryover from the old British series*** Til Death Do Us Part.*** They certainly don’t make much sense in a blue-collar New Yorker.
After all ,Archie was supposed to have grown up in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. By then, New York was ALREADY heavily Irish and Italian.
In the British series, Alf Garnett was a working class Protestant to whom Catholics were some kind of exotic invaders who threatened to change the makeup of his neighborhood. But Catholics certainly weren’t exotic outsiders in New York during the time of Archie Bunker’s childhood.
I was born in 1961- so, when I was a kid, Astoria was largely Irish and ITalian, with a large number of elderly German Lutherans still hanging on. By the time I was in high school, the Irish were mostly gone, and the neighborhood was overwhelmingly Greek and Italian.
As I said, I grew up among a lot of people who talked like Archie Bunker! THAT part rang true. But the show NEVER gave any kind of feel for the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. All those years in Astoria, and Archie never made a single crack about those greasy Greek neighbors and their smelly souvlaki stands???
PSYCH is set in, and appears to be filmed in, Santa Barbara.
I suspect that Curb Your Enthusiasm gives you a pretty solid feel of life with the rich Hollywood side of Los Angeles culture – the places they go, the things they do. So I’d say it’s strongly regional, although the behavior displayed therein is farcical.
A few Canadian shows are unabashedly regional:
Older shows:
**The Beachcombers **- Coastal British Columbia
**King of Kensington **- Toronto - Kensington to be precise
**Da Vinci’s Inquest **- Vancouver
Current ones:
**Being Erica **- Toronto, show website even has a map pinpointing where in various plot events occur
**Republic of Doyle **- St. John’s Newfoundland
**Little Mosque on the Prairie **- Saskatchewan
Anti-Irish jokes might have been a carry-over, but I don’t really remember any from TDUP and they wouldn’t have been about them being Catholic. Catholics also weren’t exotic outsiders in London even 90 years ago.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned Taxi yet, for NYC.
Also:
I Dream Of Jeannie—Coco Beach
Northern Exposure—small Alaskan town
Superman—NYC
Batman—Gotham City 
Not being English, I couldn’t say.
I only know that, while
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There are places in the Southern U.S. where fundamentalist Protestants still view Catholics with suspicion (even viewing them as “not really Christian”), and
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In the Eighteenth century, there were many American Protestants who demonized Catholics as foreign troublemakers (the phrase “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” comes to mind)…
Such anti-Catholicism was long dead and gone in the Northern states by the time Archie Bunker was supposed to be born. His anti-Catholicism never made much sense.
I thought MAYBE it might have made more sense in the character of Alf Garnett… but maybe not.
Not really. On the mainland, Catholic vs. Protestant hasn’t been an issue for a few hundred years. Anti-Irish certainly, especially in Alf Garnett’s time, with the IRA and all, but it’s not a religious thing - at least, not in anti-Irish jokes. Anti-Catholicism is not one of the -isms you’d expect a bigot to adhere to.
Actually, technically the PM can’t be Catholic, and the monarch can’t be one or marry one. The latter makes some sense, since the monarch is the head of the Church of England, but the former is an anachronism that doesn’t really carry over into everyday life and I bet it’ll be fixed soon enough.
The one Alf Garnett scene I remember in a church is when he was asking the vicar, tentatively, whether in the afterlife he’d be reunited with his second wife or his first and was really worried about it; it was quite touching.
I just looked up a couple of Alf Garnett clips and it was like Daily Mail commentators come to life. 