Los Angeles for example is always portrayed as a bright sunny place in the movies and pictures, but flying to there a lot in the MSFS with real time weather, I was surprised how often it was cloudy and gloomy, with lots of fog in the early morning. Probably San Gabriel mountains trap some of that ocean humidity there.
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Fog is common anywhere near large bodies of water. How fast it burns off in the sun is the variable.
As to your quesion, yes, it is often cold and snowy here. It is also sometimes fall and summer.
I agree about Los Angeles. It’s not at all what people expect. I love living here, but it’s not a great place for tourists. It’s all spread out, and it’s hard to know what’s good and what’s hype unless you just know. It’s an incredible place for the culture and food, nature and diversity. Art, music, sports, entertainment. We got it all. But it gets shown as like all fancy and basic or like a homeless hellscape in the media.
New England is visually fairly similar, although filmmakers will often introduce southern or midwestern tropes to try and convey that its rural.
Upstate NY is nothing like it is portrayed on TV.
I used to think the discussion of upstate NY on Law and Order was hilarious.
1. Albany has no subway of any kind.
2. It isn’t all prisons.
3. You can’t drive a huge distance upstate and be back in NYC the same day.
A few things are not so nice but accurate. Albany is a den of corruption.
>Raleigh
>Depicted in popular culture at all
Nope. Most directors are not gonna show urban areas in the south; the south & rurality are tied together inextricably as a TV trope
Toledo, Ohio is usually the butt of the joke in pop culture. Which is pretty accurate and funny.
The biggest tv show is A.P. Bio which is a tv show about a Harvard Graduate being stuck teaching in Toledo, OH and not getting his dream job.
I’ve never seen it but Toledo isn’t really anywhere anyone wants to be. You’re either born here or you’re just stuck here. It’s a drab and dull city. i think it’s funny to make fun of. Toledoans will join in
Toledo might be the most uncool US city. Luckily it keeps our rent $700
Vermont has Newhart. Well, we have B&Bs, so I guess that’s accurate. And I’ve actually met people who remind me of Larry, his brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl.
When Vermont shows up otherwise, it tends to be the setting of a vacation or weekend getaway, which, I guess is also accurate, even though we only ever see the inside of lodgings.
I’ve never seen The Sex Lives of College Girls, which apparently takes place in Burlington. How well it depicts the life of students in a college town like Burlington, I couldn’t say. I doubt the show dealt with the affordability crisis the city has recently found itself in.
In pop culture everyone thinks about Portland as being weird. Actually it’s kind of mundane like everyone else.
I don’t know. I mean Sam Adams has the whole “your cousin from Boston” and he’s a absolute idiot. I think people think everyone here is the Irish or Italian immigrant from the city with the strong accent itching to fight someone at a Patriots game.
It’s sorta nice having a not great reputation — when people come here they are pretty surprised how friendly and nice people are. It’s nice to always hear from visitors how much they like it. I think some regions are over hyped about them being friendly, and people can be disappointed it seems just like home.
Hollywood thinks everywhere in Wisconsin is Green Bay/Dairy Country.
Also, could they stop setting things in Milwaukee if they’ve never even talked to someone from Milwaukee long enough to know what our accent sounds like?
I couldn’t make it through the Dahmer docudrama because everyone sounded like they were from the UP. But at least that wasn’t as egregious as Laverne & Shirley, where everyone sounded like they were from Brooklyn or Long Island.
The only work I can think of that was a somewhat accurate depiction of Wisconsin is That 70s Show.
New Orleans checking in here…. Lots of drinking and partying going on. And I could see a real “second line” funeral on any given week.
DC has around 40,000 undergrads, a ton of service industry workers, and a lot of people with boring government jobs that have nothing to do with politics, but both popular media and the average person seems to think that everyone here works on the Hill or is a lobbyist.
We’re obviously more political than the average city, but there’s an entire other side of life here that rarely gets any attention.
Caveat that although I grew up in the Philadelphia region, but haven’t lived there is 25+ years…
Most pop culture depictions of the city seem to give a pretty accurate impression of both its faded Guilded Age elegance and post-war decline.
But one thing they always get wrong- the accent. Admittedly, the Philadelphia accent is very hard to reproduce, so when pop cluture wants to depict a working-class Philadelphian, they’ll just substitute a generic NY accent. Band of Brothers was particularly guilty of this, even using a bad southern accent in one case.
Not everyone lives in a big, fancy apartment in Manhattan
Very and not very at the same time…
It’s funny how many friends/family out of state ask me why I moved to Florida but then say they wish they could go to the beach every other day like I do, or get jealous when I tell them the weather in the winter. Summer kinda sucks but it’s manageable (unless you work outside lmao)
The one depiction that made me go “yup, that’s home” was the show Mo.
For the most part, compared to my experience, TV depictions of Texas are way too “Texan.” We’re not really as cowboy, conservative, rural, or religious as our depictions.
Also, besides Mo, I don’t know of any depictions of Texas I’ve seen that properly capture just how connected to Mexico the non-Austin Texan cities are.
Seattle is seen in pop culture as constantly raining. In reality, our summers are sunny and dry, but usually not too hot. I look out the window today, though, and it reminds me of things to come. Gray, rainy, and cool. Also, just about every movie set in Seattle is filmed in Vancouver. It always kind of takes me out of the movie when you see a b-roll shot of the Seattle skyline, and then in the next scene, you see the actors walking around Vancouver.
Dallas is pretty much what you think it is. Big, hot, sprawling city.
It’s not just LA that is depicted like that, but also often California as a whole. California tends to get portrayed as if it is ALL like either LA or San Francisco, and with warm and sunny weather all the time. The reality is that the state has both a diverse geography and diverse climate, with just about all major world biomes present, except for the tropical rainforest.
Detroit isn’t a wasteland of gang warfare. I appreciated that, as a counterbalance, “Detroiters” showcased some of the good, weird things about metro Detroit (exaggerated a bit for comedic effect—the ads were very close spoofs of local ads that I and the creators grew up watching).
The Sopranos is an incredibly accurate portrayal of North Jersey
Des Moines, accurate 15-20 years ago. Not so much now, we’re much bigger. There’s actually a lot going on, but it’s just like any other city just a bit smaller.
The only thing close to my region being depicted is Reservation Dogs.
Aside from all the supernatural stuff, it’s pretty accurate.
I live in Minnesota. It’s usually depicted as always winter and cold and rural. While our winters are long and often cold, summers are very warm. We also are outside a lot, even when it’s cold. We have large cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul has a lot to offer. Though the accent is real, lol.
When I’ve seen San Francisco in movies and TV the demographics of the characters seems really off. It’s usually just typical movie casting, mostly white and maybe a couple black characters. In reality the second largest ethnic group is Asian and there really are a lot of gay people, it’s not just a jokey stereotype. A workplace show would realistically have a mix of white, Asian, black, and Latino people, and at least 10% of them would be queer. I’ve never seen anything set in SF that portrayed that accurately.
Buffalo isn’t really all that depressed or rusty anymore.
The city has a modern economy, a large community of young professionals and areas filled with college kids.
A lot of the industrial areas are filled with $$$$ lofts, startup space, breweries and quirky businesses.
Like the movie Buffaloed was a tired collection of 90s stereotypes.
On the flip side, upstate has a TON of cozy small towns straight out of a Hallmark movie.
Nashville, spot on. Bourbon Street East.