Are they? NBC Nightly News is broadcast from New York. NFL on FOX is broadcast from Los Angeles. etc. etc. etc. Why do I never hear, “Coming to you live from our studios in [Chicago] [San Diego] [Houston]…”?
For live broadcasts, the East Coast is most convenient in order to deal with rebroadcasting at a later hour for the western timezones. New York was already the largest market for radio (due to it being by far the largest east-coast city at the time) and so all the radio networks were based there. The TV networks were built by the same companies.
Movie studios set themselves up in LA because it’s sunny, and you need light to make movies. When the networks started buying pre-filmed shows, it made sense for TV production companies to set up in LA so they could use all the existing infrastructure for the movies. Ergo, everybody involved in TV is in either New York or LA.
Of course, occasionally you have a locally-produced show that makes it big through syndication. Oprah was famously produced in Chicago for most of its run. And many scripted dramas have moved up to the burgeoning Vancouver film industry due to cheaper labor costs in Canada.
This is something associated with live shows going back into the days of radio. Almost everything national was coming out of New York, America’s largest city, and the center of American business and communication.
The move to Los Angeles, Hollywood basically, was a natural move for TV, merging with the center of show business in California. Fox was originally a movie studio and already based there.
Basically, that’s where the national companies have their studios and headquarters, and national broadcasts will identify that.
Also, Oprah, for example, broadcatsts her national show out of Chicago. Chicago WGN is a nationwide network, and Atlanta has always been the home of CNN, which also has studios in Washington and New York. So not all national broadcasts come from New York and LA.
ETA: A lot of overlap with** friedo’s **post
Actors and production staffers like to live near where they can find work, but sometimes a regional oddity (like Seattle’s Almost Live) goes national. Bozo was filmed in lots of cities using local crews and audiences.
American Bandstand was produced in Philadelphia, Hee Haw in Nashville and lots of Disney shows in Orlando. The Wire and Homicide were both filmed in Baltimore, and Memphis Heat was filmed in…New Orleans. I think a lot of PBS content is filmed in Boston, but won’t swear to it.
Is it a lot more expensive to film in other cities (a la Oprah)? Why don’t more shows do what she did? It seems like it should be pretty easy with modern telecommunications to have a studio show filmed just about anywhere they can drum up enough people for a studio audience and enough qualified staffers to run it. If it’s that much of a hassle, why didn’t they just film Oprah in New York or LA?
PBS has an unusual model where most content is produced by local stations and then syndicated by the network. Nova and This Old House are both produced by WGBH in Boston, Mr. Rogers by WQED in Pittsburgh, Nature and American Masters by WNET in New York, and so on.
Oprah was a local Chicago talk show produced by a Chicago TV station which happened to hit it big in syndication. They didn’t “bother” to film it in New York or LA because there would be no point, they were a Chicago-based production from the beginning.
Talk shows and local news are one thing, but there are very few scripted shows filmed outside LA, (and increasingly Vancouver) because that is simply where everyone is. Not just actors and studio audiences, all the writers, directors, sound engineers, editors, special effects people, title artists, foley studios, costume rentals, prop warehouses, talent agencies, entertainment lawyers, set decorators, make-up geniuses, entertainment reporters, production companies, studios, distribution companies, film labs, score composers, session musicians, and Charlie Sheen’s drug dealers. They’re all there. No city, even New York, has anything close to the infrastructure that LA has.
For scripted shows, New York’s industry is much smaller, and survives mostly because there is a never-ending supply of Broadway stars willing to play a corpse on Law & Order.
And as mentioned, for live national news and such, you just need to be on the East Coast anyway.
To be fair, Oprah didn’t move because of Oprah. She was popular enough that the stars and the topics came to her. Oprah liked Chicago and wasn’t going to budge.
Others like Phil Donahue moved cities. Donahue said, officially it was to be nearer to his wife but it was really a matter of getting guests, who are usually in NYC or LA
I recall the Max Robinson was out of Chicago, when ABC News did their national news in the late 70s or early 80s out of three different cities.
As others stated, the NY / LA thing started with radio, which is why prime time runs from 8pm - 11pm (East and West) and 7pm - 10pm (Central and Mountain)
The movie industry started in New York because Edison invented movie cameras and was centered in this area. Later, much of it moved west, in part because at the time there was a lot of what we would call copyright infringement (people reselling movies that other people made) and the distance made it harder to prosecute. They settled in southern California because the year round good weather and variety of scenery made it a good place to film stuff.
Occasionally you’ll get a big show which goes against the grain. Law & Order was filmed entirely in New York,which is why you used to see so many NY based actors in it.
Ever listen to NPR? Their news broadcasts almost always begin with “From NPR News in Washington…”