Merely stating that a TV show takes
place in a certain city does not make it so -- especially when it’s so obvious that the show playing right before your eyes was not filmed where it is supposed to be.
A case in point is
“The Blacklist,” the James Spader drama which returns for its third season Thursday night on NBC. In the premiere episode -- which I watched earlier this week courtesy of NBC -- the
setting is so easily recognizable as New York that I was too distracted to concentrate on the plot.
Apparently, you’re supposed to believe the episode is taking place in Washington, D.C.
The method the show’s writers had adopted to put this illusion across was to pepper the dialogue with references to D.C. streets and neighborhoods, which are then strenuously name-dropped --
Adams Morgan, Foxhall Road, Shaw, Kalorama Heights, Dupont Circle.
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In fact, let’s focus on Dupont Circle for a moment. It is one of many such “circles” in Washington, where
most of the streets radiate out from traffic circles like spokes on a wagon wheel. Viewed from above, the layout of Washington is distinctly different from the famous “grid” street pattern
that predominates in New York City, in which most of the streets and avenues connect strictly at 90-degree angles to each other (notwithstanding the many exceptions to this).
An overhead shot
of a neighborhood of attached homes seen in “The Blacklist” is a good example of this. This shot was almost certainly obtained from the skies over New York -- either Manhattan or Brooklyn.
The street pattern was simply much too orderly to be Washington’s.
Other scenes in Thursday night’s premiere episode provide further proof that the show was filmed in New York
City. New Yorkers will know immediately that these settings were in New York, no matter how many vans or police cars the producers masked with decals proclaiming them to be in Washington.
The
real question might be: Do the majority of viewers care about, or even notice this obvious charade? Residents of the New York area (the nation’s largest television market with 7.4 million TV
households) and Washington (ranked seventh with 2.4 million TV homes) might be distracted by this falsehood, but viewers living elsewhere apparently find it easy to buy into the illusion. After all,
“The Blacklist” hasn’t made it to its third season by driving its audience to distraction over its setting.
The same might be said for other shows as well. “The
Americans” on FX is supposed to take place in Washington and northern Virginia, but that show is also filmed in New York City and its environs. And here again, to a New Yorker, the show’s
attempt at creating this illusion often fails when scenes shot outdoors are so obviously filmed on New York City streets.
“The Good Wife” is filmed in New York too, although
it is supposed to take place in Chicago. And yes, I am aware that many shows that are supposed to take place in New York and other cities are not filmed where they are supposed to be.
Some
years back, a slew of movies and television shows that were supposed to be set in New York were filmed in Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, where local governments were rolling out the
red carpet for TV production companies. Of course, it was painfully obvious that many of those movies and TV shows didn’t look anything like New York either.
Today, though, New
York has become the Vancouver and Toronto of TV production -- standing in for Washington, Chicago and heaven knows where else.
As for the premiere episode of “The Blacklist,”
whether it’s in New York, Washington or Timbuktu, fans of the show will probably love it.
“The Blacklist” starts its third season Thursday night (Oct. 1) at 9 Eastern on
NBC.