After a few drinks yesterday, we tried to name all the cities that had been the ‘home’ of televisions series. Obviously this is too open-ended, so we switched to trying to guess which is the largest city (by population) that HADN’T been used as the setting of a series. After a few more drinks the subject fuzzed away…
Anyway, the question is bothering me. Here is a list of the 25 most populous cities in the United States (snabbed from Wikipedia) and I’ve added series for those I can think of. Can you help ‘disqualify’ some of the rest? If it turns out all of the top 25 have been used, well, there were 258 cities with at least 100,000 in population…
Rules:
Only television series counts, meaning at least three episodes had to have been shown on television – movies don’t count, not even ‘made for TV movies.’ (Unless, maybe a movie had two sequels…)
“Fiction” series only, no Reality TV or Information or Sports or Documentaries.
Only shows from major networks count.
The show has to have been set there, as in, the main characters lived or worked there, not just some characters passed through during a stray episode.
It only takes one show to ‘disqualify’ a city, so there’s no need to list more series for a given city past one. (But feel free…)
Top 25 U.S. Cities
1 New York New York “All in the Family”
2 Los Angeles California “LA Law”
3 Chicago Illinois “Chicago Hope”
4 Houston Texas
5 Phoenix Arizona “Alice”
6 Philadelphia Pennsylvania “Quincy”
7 San Antonio Texas
8 San Diego California “Simon & Simon”
9 Dallas Texas “Dallas”
10 San Jose California
11 Detroit Michigan “Home Improvement”
12 Jacksonville Florida
13 Indianapolis Indiana
14 San Francisco California “Streets of San Francisco”
15 Columbus Ohio
16 Austin Texas
17 Memphis Tennessee
18 Fort Worth Texas
19 Baltimore Maryland “Hot L Baltimore”
20 Charlotte North Carolina
21 El Paso Texas
22 Boston Massachusetts “Cheers”
23 Seattle Washington “Frazier”
24 Washington District of Columbia “Hawk”
25 Milwaukee Wisconsin “Laverne & Shirley”
I haven’t had any luck searing for it, but there was a thread on this topic about 3 years ago naming all the cities tv shows have been set in. Maybe someone who is a better searcher can find it.
Funny how many cities not in the top 25 have been “host” to TV series… #28: Las Vegas, Vega$ #34: Atlanta, Designing Women #40: Cleveland, The Drew Carey Show #43: Miami, Miami Vice #47: Minneapolis, Mary Tyler Moore #91: Reno, Reno 911*
*Is Comedy Central a “major network”? They run The Daily Show, so I’ll say yes.
I dunno, some of the cities in the OP aren’t listed.
The only series I can think of that were set in Austin were one series of The Real World (reality TV) and this strange little indie series MTV used to run maybe 10 years ago that I’ve totally forgotten the name of.
OK, I just looked it up, it was called…wait for it…Austin Stories. :smack: It ran in 1997 (hey, I was right) and was MTV’s first situation comedy, running for twelve episodes.
There hasn’t been any set in Rochester, which was in the top 25 cities at the start of the television age, and whose metro area is still over 1 million and so in the top 50.
This page about movies and TV shows filmed in Texas doesn’t list a series for San Antonio, although I supposed you could set a series there that you film somewhere else.
