Which shows best captured New York, L.A., Chicago, and more?
Most of the best-realized and most memorable towns and cities on TV — Twin Peaks, Washington; Sunnydale, California; Cicely, Alaska; and The Prisoner‘s Village, not to mention the all-purpose "Springfield" of The Simpsons — exist only in TV Land. But there are exceptions.
1) New York: DAMAGES
New York has always been one of the most popular locations for crime shows. You could use some of the classic "New York" shows to chart the way the city’s profile has shifted over the years, starting with sitcoms like Car 54, Where Are You?, whose corny character types and GPS system of a theme song ("There’s a holdup in the Bronx/ Brooklyn’s broken out in fights/ There’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights") provide a snapshot of a lost New York where human beings of all income brackets actually put down roots. In later years, the middle-aged stars of Kojak and The Equalizer served as daddy figures trying to stem the chaos of the ungovernable city and save a few deserving souls. By the start of the ’90s, the arrival of the first Law & Order series, with its super-efficient cops combing through mugshots provided by the best casting agencies in town and neatly filing away miscreants, seemed to anticipate the Giuliani era of "cleaning up the city." Right now, the great New York is Damages, the FX legal drama whose lawyers are too busy treating the office as their own personal S & M chamber to ever see the inside of a courtroom. Haunted by what they’ve had to do for wealth enough to live there in a bearable style, they crack and lash out. As a whole, it captures the spirit of a place whose inhabitants would rather believe their home is hellish than dull.
2) Los Angeles: THE SHIELD
Los Angeles is the other favorite setting for cop shows, and not just because the cameras are already there. TV and movies have always relished that so much corruption could coexist alongside the sunshine and palm trees. Dragnet‘s Sgt. Joe Friday did his damndest to straighten the place out, but today the LAPD has gone so far beyond the niceties of mere moral ambiguity that an hour in L.A. would probably send Friday screaming for the exit, if he could make it there before one of L.A.’s finest put a bullet in his dome on general principle. The Friday of the post-Daryl Gates era is The Shield‘s Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), who operates out of the fictional Farmington District. (The show was inspired by the take-no-prisoners ethos of the Rampart Division’s CRASH unit, and in fact the series was developed under the title Rampart before somebody at the network started imagining what might go down at their own next traffic stop.) Part of what makes Mackey a man of his time is the way his lack of scruples merges with his self-image as a working-class hero — he regards morals as a convenience enjoyed by those who don’t have to worry about putting food on the table. His rancidness seems to contaminate the whole area. The town motto of this L.A. could be "No Shelter."
3) New Orleans: FRANK’S PLACE
This cult series, which ran for one season on CBS in 1988-89, stars Tim Reid as a Big Easy restauranteur. (The title eatery was modeled on Pampy’s Creole Kitchen, whose legendary chef, Austin Leslie, died in 2005 after being rescued from his attic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.) The show captures the city’s mixture of urban-tropical atmosphere and old-world charm so perfectly that, just watching the characters navigate the humid streets and settle in for some raconteuring inside the fan-cooled restaurant and bar, you may feel the urge to mop your brow and change your shirt. One of the rare network sitcoms filmed without a laugh track, it also has a quiet, slow-moving feel that’s closer to the charms of New Orleans than anything else on TV. As in the city itself, the quiet is belied by the velocity of the ideas about race and manners and living history that buzz around as the characters exchange lines between forkfuls of crawfish etouffee.
4) Chicago: CRIME STORY
Michael Mann’s serial shoot-’em-up relocated to Las Vegas two-thirds of the way through its first season, but the early, Chicago-set episodes have a sense of place that remains hard to shake off. In this vision of Chicago in the period before the assassination of John Kennedy, the city really does seem to have big shoulders, and also hair on its chest. The architecture, period cars and clothes, tough talk, and gunfights all paint a portrait of the city as swaggering bruiser. It’s so macho it’s funny, but it’s also exciting, even if the women who are permitted to make an impression (Darlanne Fleugel and Pam Grier among them) end up being driven out of the narrative; they can’t compete with the murderous drives of the men (cops led by Dennis Farina and a rising young gangster played by Anthony Denison). It’s as if the guys sense that they have an obligation to kill each other just to live up to Chicago’s reputation.
5) Baltimore: THE WIRE
David Simon’s Homicide: Life on the Street made Baltimore a vehicle for his obsession with the failure of institutions. Network executives found it too "downbeat." Simon then really went to town with this HBO series. Yet for a show that’s often called a downer even by people who love it, The Wire, with its journalistic veneer and teeming cast of characters, bestows a certain dignity on the city and its inhabitants. The corruption is bone deep, requiring so much commitment from the people employed to fight it that the relationships between the cops and the crooks are often stronger than the cops’ sputtering connections to their own families. And with no institutional support in an environment where the infrastructure seems to be crumbling before your very eyes, the survivors deserve credit for standing up all on their own, and those who don’t survive deserve credit for trying.
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6) Miami: BURN NOTICE
In the 1980s, Miami had a schizoid image on TV: the sun-baked, pastel-tinted land of firefights and rock-star cameos seen in Miami Vice, and the geriatric sitcom setting of The Golden Girls and Empty Nest. Part of the charm of the USA comedy-adventure series Burn Notice is how it marries these two seemingly incompatible visions; together, they actually almost capture the place. The aging hero, a blacklisted spy, joins up with his retired-spy buddies to cruise the beachfront cafes and touristy shops, get chased through the Everglades, and blow stuff up real good, but only when he doesn’t have a firm date to swing by his mom’s house and — taking a deep breath before entering, so as not to inhale the cigarette smoke that is her natural atmosphere — help her move something. If the terrorist plotters don’t get you, the Early Bird Specials might.
7) Washington, D.C.: THE X-FILES
Chris Carter’s conspiracy-fest certainly did its part to feed the free-floating paranoia of the 1990s. Its heroes, the celibate FBI hotties Mulder and Scully, were inside the Washington culture but not of it, feuding with the bureaucracy while keeping an eye peeled for unmarked helicopters. This isn’t the Chocolate City that gave us go-go music and Marion Berry, but the D.C. of a talk-radio listener’s imagination, a gray concrete landscape where national monuments look down in despair and every shadow seems to be carrying a license to kill. Of course, you could argue that this effect was achieved partly by shooting most of the show in Canada. But that’s just part of Cancer Man’s big plan.
8) Las Vegas: CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION
Most Vegas shows have aimed for glitz and turned to cheese pretty fast. One reason that the original CSI works so much better than its various spin-offs and imitations is that it uses the city as counterweight to the clinical, brainy approach of its heroes, who in the early episodes always seemed on the verge of turning to the camera and triumphantly yelling, "Science!" Vegas offers a thrilling variety of photogenic locales for dead bodies to turn up, from the expensive sleaze of penthouse hotel rooms to the cheap sleaze of roadside motel rooms, with the option of road trips to the middle of the desert when the lights and noise wear you down. It also provides no end of colorful reasons to have gotten oneself killed in the first place.
9) Cleveland: THE DREW CAREY SHOW
Stage-set sitcoms always make a point of telling you where they’re set, but even the best usually don’t give off a strong sense of local atmosphere: we all know that, say, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis, but in practice all this meant was that every once in a while, somebody would make his entrance brushing plastic snow off his coat. Although Drew Carey’s show wasn’t exactly a cinema-verite tour of Cleveland, the everyguy, proud-slacker quality that emanated from its star also matched up remarkably well with the image of a city that had been treated as a punchline on a thousand TV comedies. Carey made it clear that he was conscious of this with the original theme song, "Moon Over Parma" ("We’re goin’ bowlin’/ So don’t lose her in Solon…") and its replacement, "Cleveland Rocks", as well as in numerous small touches: he may be the only sitcom hero to lounge around reading a copy of Cleveland’s own American Splendor.
10) Philadelphia: THIRTYSOMETHING
Philly may be the cradle of American liberty, but in thirtysomething, Philadelphia is the place where individual liberty — i.e. wayward youth — goes to die, or at least resigns itself to wearing a suit and tie in hopes of building something more substantial. That something more substantial does take shape, but, like the city’s favorite tourist attraction, it’ll always have a noticeable crack in it. As the characters grow older and more weighed down with obligation, and life at the big, bad corporate advertising agency becomes more and more Orwellian, the weather seems to get rainier and rainier. Are those Benjamin Franklin’s tears falling from heaven, or an oblique admission from the producers that, by the time the show went off the air in 1991, they’d realized that they really should have set it in Seattle?
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