It’s a Really Small World

Half of America does not live in Los Angeles or New York.

Except on TV.

There was a time when a young woman tried to make it in the big city--and the big city was Minneapolis. Extended families fought over their fortunes in Dallas or Denver. Two roommates sought love and success--in Milwaukee.

These days, however, prime-time TV has largely abandoned Middle America. This season, for example, there are 24 network series set in New York and 16 in Los Angeles.

The reasons are as subtle as social change and as simple as not wanting to change license plates. They are as sincere as writers’ desire for verisimilitude and as manipulative as networks’ desire for advertising.

The result, though, is that TV viewers can’t touch their remote without being bombarded by images from the nation’s two largest cities. Comedies? “Mad About You,” “The Nanny” or “Spin City” in New York, to name a few. In Los Angeles, there’s “Ellen,” “Jenny” and “Cybill.” Dramas? Try “Brooklyn South,” “Michael Hayes” and “413 Hope St.” in New York. And then there are “Cracker,” “Players” and “Melrose Place” in Los Angeles.

“Why we’re suddenly getting this concentration on urban centers is basically that the pendulum flips back and forth in TV,” said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “When something is successful, there’s a lot of imitations, until it reaches a saturation point.”

Jeff Bader, vice president of program planning and scheduling at ABC, said all the networks have tried to replicate the success of NBC’s single-people-in-the-city comedies, such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” Likewise the gritty urban dramas, like ABC’s “NYPD Blue.” “Imitation,” Bader said, employing a quote from the late comic Fred Allen, “is the sincerest form of television.”

The result is location burnout. It hit Los Angeles long ago and is now starting to take the shine off the Big Apple.

“It feels like a breath of fresh air now when something isn’t set in New York,” said Karey Burke, NBC’s senior vice president for prime-time series.

Still, the networks continue to want their shows to be set in big cities, says Tony Jonas, president of Warner Bros. Television, which produces more prime-time series--including “ER,” “The Drew Carey Show” and “Murphy Brown”--than any other company.

“I’ve sat in many meetings where the locale is extremely important to the network,” he said.

The major broadcast networks’ primary interest is in scheduling programs that draw an 18- to 49-year-old urban demographic, because those are the viewers advertisers want to reach. About 75% of Americans live in cities or their surrounding areas, and younger people are thought not to be as set in their buying habits and therefore more susceptible to being swayed by commercials.

Not surprisingly, then, when TV producers try to concoct shows with a perfect mixture of empathy and fantasy, they set them in Los Angeles or New York--or maybe Chicago or San Francisco--and populate them with young people. Even kinder, gentler CBS--once home to “Northern Exposure” (Alaska) and “Murder, She Wrote” (Maine)--has added the cops of “Brooklyn South” and New York prosecutor “Michael Hayes” to its lineup this season.

Cable TV--always the alternative to network programming--is a little more creative in choosing its locales. MTV moves its “Real World” around the country and has set its half-hour comedy “Austin Stories” in that Texas university town. USA’s “Silk Stalkings” unfolds in Palm Beach, Fla. AMC’s “Remember WENN” plays out in Pittsburgh. Nickelodeon’s “Gullah Gullah Island” takes place off the coast of South Carolina, and “The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo” is set in Florida.

Network TV writers and producers claim that they are simply trying to write what they know--and many of them came from New York and now live in Los Angeles. That hardly explains the mid-1980s, though, when Top 10 comedies were set in Columbus, Ohio (“Family Ties”), Boston (“Cheers”), Miami (“Golden Girls”) and Connecticut (“Who’s the Boss?”). On the drama side, conniving families undermined one another in “Dallas” or “Dynasty’s” Denver or the California wine country of “Falcon Crest.” TV’s mystery solvers--amateur and professional--hung out in Georgia (“In the Heat of the Night”), Hawaii (“Magnum, P.I.”) and Florida (“Miami Vice”).

But there is also the line of thought that says if TV is going to deal with contemporary issues, it needs to be in the cities, where those issues first bubble to the surface. New York, in particular, offers storytellers many options because it isn’t as associated with a single industry, the way Los Angeles is with show business.

Patricia Reed Scott, the commissioner of the mayor’s office of film, theater and broadcasting in New York, said that TV is also, in part, reflecting her city’s recent revitalization. Crime is down. Tourism is up. That fashionableness has, in turn, been abetted by television.

“You have Letterman going out into the street. You have the ‘Today’ show with happy tourists putting up their signs. Now you have MTV with their studio on Times Square,” Scott said. “The message is that this is an inexhaustible city for lively and interesting things to happen.”

Bill Finkelstein agrees. An executive producer of “Brooklyn South,” he previously produced “Civil Wars” and “L.A. Law”:

“It has a certain density and a variety of ethnic groups that live there,” he said. “And I think New York has a certain mythic quality as a city. It’s the biggest of all American cities, and there’s a certain sense of it being a self-contained, separate universe.”

The native New Yorker also acknowledges that he misses his hometown while working in Hollywood: “I think that you write about it as an exercise in homesickness. Also, in pragmatic terms, it gets you back there more often.”

There’s a certain enviable cachet to the New York shows. New York has “NYPD Blue.” L.A. had the short-lived “Total Security.” New York has “Mad About You.” L.A. has “Unhappily Ever After.”

Moreover, with six networks and countless film crews crawling the streets, Los Angeles sights have become staples of television. Viewers have gotten more sophisticated and expect more realism, so programs like “ER” and “NYPD Blue” go to Chicago and New York occasionally to shoot exteriors. L.A. is too familiar to be effective.

That visual boredom has translated into a thematic boredom with Los Angeles too. David Manson, executive producer of ABC’s “Nothing Sacred,” put that show’s Catholic parish in an unnamed Northeastern city. He wanted urban compression--something distinctly anti-Californian.

“To some extent, those of us who live here tire of L.A. as a location because it’s been used so much,” he said. “There a little bit of ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ Somehow it feels more fresh to set a series someplace else.”

It’s also safer. Manson kept “Nothing Sacred” nonspecific to avoid conflicts with any Catholic diocese. Fictional towns serve the same purpose on “The Simpsons” (Springfield) and “King of the Hill” (Arlen, Texas). What real city would want them?

Other programs trade on their ability to travel. “The X-Files” agents may be based in Washington, D.C., but they go where their business takes them. Ditto “Millennium,” “The Pretender” and “Touched by an Angel.” The “Promised Land” clan covers the country in an RV.

Out-of-the-ordinary settings also can be used to a program’s advantage.

“When you create a show that comes out in the fall, you are in this thunderous herd,” said Peter Casey, one of the creators of “Frasier.” “The viewers are saying, ‘Now which one was that?’ They’re looking at TV Guide and seeing all these new titles. . . . You just want to do all you can to make your show a little unique and stand out from the crowd.”

TV writers and producers tend to be a little myopic, Casey said: “They sort of live in a fishbowl and don’t look too far outside those two media centers. . . . When you’re looking for ratings and all, and getting the right demographics, the urban viewer is regarded as more important than the rural or small-town viewer.”

“Frasier” is undeniably urbane but set in Seattle. When developing it, Casey and his partners felt that their best chance for success was to make the spinoff as different as possible from “Cheers.” That included setting it geographically far from Boston. The only other city considered was Denver.

Settings have been chosen for less. “Home Improvement” is in Detroit because that’s where star Tim Allen hails from. “Soul Man,” from the same producers and also on ABC, takes place in Detroit as well so that characters from Allen’s popular show could do walk-ons.

Likewise, Drew Carey set his eponymous sitcom in his hometown, Cleveland. Co-creator Bruce Helford said that when he and Carey were developing the ABC show, they wanted it to be an anti-”Seinfeld”--and part of that was getting away from New York or Los Angeles.

“People in New York and Los Angeles want to have careers. People in Cleveland are happy to have jobs,” said Helford, who also worked on “Roseanne,” which was set in Illinois.

“A city like Cleveland is more working class, the people are more down to earth, and the problems they have are more relatable,” he said. “I think more of America is like Cleveland.”

The other interesting thing about Cleveland is that it loves “The Drew Carey Show.” Nationally, the program drew an 18 share--or percentage of the available audience--in 1996-97. In Cleveland, it got a 31 share. Similarly, “Frasier” gets an 18 share nationally but 30 in Seattle. “Homicide: Life on the Street” is set in Baltimore and gets a 26 share there versus 15 in the rest of the United States.

As executive vice president for planning and research at CBS, David Poltrack is in charge of gathering research on viewers and what they watch. He says that conventional wisdom is that TV shows will get bigger audiences in the cities where they are set--especially if city landmarks are integrated into the show.

Networks don’t have any geographic strategies, he said. But they do own TV stations in some cities--like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. So if a network has to pick a setting, Poltrack said, it will lean toward cities where it owns a station. That way the network--not just an affiliate--benefits from increased ratings and higher ad revenues.

The irony is that so few shows have any true sense of place. According to Syracuse professor Thompson: “It’s the veneer of L.A. laid over the setting of New York.”

These days, he gives high marks to “NYPD Blue” for capturing an authentic feel of New York. But sitcoms are terribly nonspecific. “ ‘Frasier’ is about as Seattle as a couple of references to the Space Needle.”

Given that TV is so derivative, Thompson said, it’s surprising that the industry hasn’t taken a cue from another formulaic genre, mystery novels, which use local or regional color to set stories apart.

“But to get local color you have to go there and shoot it there, and you have to have actors that are from there,” he said. “An author can supply all that in a book. A TV show has to show it all.”

One program that fully made use of its setting, Thompson said, was “Miami Vice.” That 1984-89 series filmed entirely on location using the colors and architecture and bicultural atmosphere of the South Florida city.

“As outdated and silly as it looks now, it broke a lot of ground in a lot of areas, and this is certainly one of them,” he said.

Aaron Spelling agrees that to capture a city’s feel, you truly have to go there, which is exactly what he did with “Vega$” and “Savannah.” The latter was filmed entirely outside Atlanta and in Savannah, Ga.

“We wanted to shoot there because it was a different kind of ‘Gone With the Wind’ look,” Spelling said. “And Vegas is Vegas. There’s just an excitement in Vegas that doesn’t exist anyplace else. You can’t name a show ‘Vega$’ and shoot it in Los Angeles or Vancouver.”

Producing shows far from Hollywood isn’t easy, though. So most of Spelling’s current crop--all of which use ample exteriors--are set in California: “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place” and “Seventh Heaven.” WB’s “Seventh Heaven” is in a fictional small town called Glen Oak--but the town is in California so that no car license plates had to be changed.

Such conveniences are part of any setting decision, explained Spelling’s producing partner, E. Duke Vincent. There are some locations you can cheat, he said, but “a Southern city like Savannah--or Charleston too--you’re not going to be able to shoot that in New York or Los Angeles.”

Producers have to balance what the show really needs versus the expense and exasperation of working in towns where there may not be film crews, labs or talent.

“That gets expensive, and that’s money you will not see on the screen,” Vincent said. “We like to spend money that you will see on the screen.”

Yet as every state university gets its own film school and New York and Los Angeles get saturated, who knows? TV just might hit the road more.

“That’s something filmmakers have been thinking about for a long time,” Thompson said, “and it may be time for television to think about doing that as well. I would see it as nearly utopian to have a prime-time lineup where you’d go from Kansas City to Omaha to New Orleans, using these locations and dialects.”

That may be a fantasy, but the N.Y.-L.A. lock on TV programs might be about to loosen. Warner Bros. executive Jonas, who has been sitting in on pitch sessions for next season’s TV pilots, said the pendulum is about to swing the other way.

“The networks are saying it’s OK to go to a locale that isn’t just Chicago or New York or Los Angeles,” he said. “And some of them are talking about the Milwaukees.”

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The Breakdown

Number of current network prime-time shows by locale:

New York: 24

Los Angeles:16

Chicago: 8

San Francisco: 4

Detroit: 3

Boston: 2

Washington: 2

Baltimore, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Dallas, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Martha’s Vineyard, Miami, Philadelphia,Seattle, St. Louis, St. Paul: 1