Saturday, July 31, 2010

GEO-WAIT FOR IT-GRAPHY: One thing we didn't note out of press tour is a bunch of spoilery stuff about the HIMYM crew's plans for next year (basically, they admit last year was "too sitcom-y" and are pledging to find their way back this season) but what I want to talk about is their plans to shoot (for the first time) on location in New York. HIMYM, even though it's always been shot in L.A., manages to (mostly) feel New York-ish. Many other New York-set shows that film in L.A. miss that mark completely (I'm looking at you, Friends), while some do hit the mark (both Seinfeld and Sports Night were New York-ish, even though they shot entirely in LA). What other shows/movies hit the mark or miss it completely? Does Good Wife feel Chicago-y even though it films in NYC? How badly does Toronto double for DC on Covert Affairs?

23 comments:

  1. Joseph J. Finn2:10 PM

    Wait, Good Wife is supposed to be in Chicago? Riiiight.

    Another that misses the mark is TBS' My Boys, but that's also due to it falling into the Chicago Baseball in Film Fallacy, where they act like there is only one team in Chicago and it isn't the White Sox. (See also anything with Jim Belushi.  Return to Me gets a pass just due to it being directed and written by Bonnie Hunt, a die hard Cubs fan and I can respect that.)

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  2. Nowhereman3:05 PM

    Fringe is somewhat schizophrenic in portraying Boston. Sometimes they get it spot on; often they get it hilariously wrong. They do at least feel consistently "East Coast" versus "West Coast", so at least they're on the right side of the country in general.

    I do like how Supernatural occasionally jokes about how all the places they visit look strangely like Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest, no matter where they are.

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  3. Dan Suitor3:23 PM

    My first thought when I read this post was Fringe. They've done a good job representing a lot of the second tier, slightly dilapidated  cities like Worcester and Springfield, but whenever they go into the countryside it's far too foggy.

    Also, god forbid they visit New Hampshire; there's a lot of weird stuff in my home state.

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  4. Heather K6:10 PM

    Yeah, my boys names a few of the right places but nothing really looks like Chicago, and I really wonder how PJ affords that two bedroom.

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  5. Heather K6:12 PM

    The rain that falls outside of Seattle Grace really really has a rough time replicating regular Seattle rain.  Although that may be a combo of machine made rain and how to make it rain enough to read as rain on tv.

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  6. There's some decent D.C. feel to Covert Affairs, but it's given away every time Annie walks into a Metro station and, hey, that's not the Metro.  Luckily, they're working with a script that involves a lot of running around on the outskirts of D.C., and Langley isn't that hard to duplicate elsewhere.  Throw up some trees and some confusing one-way streets or wide, useless medians and you're there.

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  7. I live in DC and I don't watch Covert Affairs (any good?) but I do watch Bones.  They get DC both incredibly right and infuriatingly wrong.  Their watering hole, Founding Fathers, is clearly based on a local restaurant, Founding Farmers, but they did an episode featuring the Metro which looked so horribly wrong.  They get their directions really screwy sometimes, too, when they drive around, and the diner and its street scene look like they belong in a Streetcar Name Desire, not modern DC.

    West Wing was mostly much better at DC - I'm not sure anyone else has gotten it so right.

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  8. Whenever they hit the road on The Office, i'm distracted by the notion that Scranton PA has palm trees.

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  9. isaac_spaceman9:52 PM

    It's kind of funny to me that the worst at this of all time was how hard it was to fake LA in Lost.  Honolulu is such a specific place with a specific vernacular architecture and a specific light that all of the "LA" scenes were so distractingly unreal. 

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  10. I thought Good Wife WAS filmed in Chicago, not because of the locations, but because I saw so many character actors that I (perhaps erroneously) associated with Chicago.

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  11. To add to the "shock" that The Good Wife takes place in Chicago, in one of the early episodes the view out of the window of one of the office buildings was actually the New York skyline (midtown-East, including the Lipstick Building)!

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  12. Pretty much any time the DC Metro gets involved and it isn't shot there, it's a dead giveaway because the DC Metro is so architecturally distinctive with the round vaulted ceilings and long/deep escalators.  There are also shows that get the characters right, but the locations wrong--Castle is a good example of that--I buy the characters as New Yorkers, and most of the stories as New York stories, but the locations are so LA-ish that it breaks the illusion.

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  13. Joseph J. Finn12:12 PM

    No, the insulting part is that it's filmed in NYC, which I assumed was the setting.

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  14. Joseph J. Finn12:13 PM

    Seriously, who sets a show in Chicago and films it in NYC?  Toronto is bland enough to substitute, but NYC is distinctive enough that it's jarring.

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  15. calliekl3:51 PM

    If they do venture into NH, I hope they do a better job than when Dawson's Creek ventured to the film festival in Hooksett, NH, which is not the first town I would think of as having a super hip indie film festival. Possibly they meant to say Keene, or Portsmouth.

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  16. calliekl3:55 PM

    I've never been to LA, so this did not occur to me until I went to Hawaii. After that, I had a hard time watching the LA scenes without thinking, hey, I've been there! Iolani Palace! Byodo-In Temple! I was suprised they didn't put the Hollywood sign on Diamond Head.

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  17. Emily4:06 PM

    I also assumed that TGW was set in NYC. Opps.

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  18. There are a ton of references to "Cook County," which suggest Chicago, of course, but even were it set in NYC, there'd be a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense geographically.

    I really admired that Royal Pains did a joke this week about two characters hopping in a cab at the Plaza and asking to be taken to Trump Tower and the driver gladly taking them the two blocks.  Reckless disregard for geography is all too common.

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  19. Genevieve10:22 PM

    A recent letter to the editor in the Washington Post discussed this very point:

    "I just saw the movie "Salt" and, like many locals who see a film made in their back yard, I was thrilled to be able to pick out local landmarks. I worked on Independence Avenue and watched when scenes from the movie were filmed there last year.
    Despite the exhilarating action sequences and fast pace of an otherwise extraordinary movie, however, there was one glaring factual error that jumped out at me. When Evelyn Salt escaped into a Metro station, the escalator was working."

    Thank you, Linda Mitchell of Woodbridge, for my best big belly laugh in a while.

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  20. Bobsyeruncle1:01 AM

    Re Covert Affairs - it's not Toronto for DC that bothers me, but last week's episode tried doubling Toronto for Venezuela.  Which was INSANE.  

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  21. the2scoops8:47 PM

    I'm always a little distracted when The Office leaves, well, the office. I've never been to Scranton but I'm sure there aren't that many palms trees.

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  22. <span>I wondered *for weeks* where in the Valley they do the driving sequences with all the eucalyptus trees.  Racking my brain, constructing google searches, finally shrugging my shoulders and thinking it must be in the canyons somewhere.  Until one day running in the same damn  park I run in every weekend I finally looked around me! </span>

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  23. "Hot in Cleveland" seems to be neither...

    "Saving Grace" did pretty well with the state of Oklahoma, according to friends who lived there.

    I watched the new Jason Lee show "Memphis" and was amazed at how forcefully the location was thrust upon me. TONS of what appeared to be genuine locations shots.

    I love me some "Criminal Minds" but for all the gallivanting around the country they do, most of the crime scenes look a lot alike.

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