After a while it wandered away from the fixer upper premise and became house porn. It’s either full gut jobs, or fetishistic and outrageously expensive detail restoration. Bobby:" well we need to add matching molding but can’t find any, so we’ll have a custom knife cut for my handy-dandy molding shaper I happen to have right here". Not for the average DIY.
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You can rent tools, you know.
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I couldn’t watch the X-Files after visiting Vancouver a enough times. Oh hey I have been in that grocery store, oh that’s Granville Island, oooh White Rock, umm why is the gas price showing price per liter?
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I guess you’re not a tool guy, that’s a pretty exotic machine that only a small portion of even contractors would possess. It would not be rentable.
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It’s always funny to see the occasional random BC license plates, gas by the litre, or km/kph signs sneaking into Vancouver filmed movies and shows.
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I don’t know it that well. Lived in Zone 4 for a bit and have good friends there - and am still close enough to go in occasionally.
I have a habit of getting into trouble taking photos in tube stations.
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After watching Twin Peaks I could still go to North Bend without thinking much of it. Deadly Premonition (which is basically Twin Peaks: The Video Game) had a far more profound effect on me as they did such a damn good job replicating the area.
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This confirms my theory that Friends worked very hard to craft their show. I wasn’t a fan of it, but I could see that a lot of effort went into the production. To me it reminds me of the A student who isn’t a natural intellect but studies very hard for a great grade.
Thanks for the inside scoop on how these shows are directed.
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RE: Friends… Exactly ! !
(Alas, that’s why I’m not a writer!)
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Then someone who owns one would be hireable. Surely there are custom molding guys. Bonus: they already know how to use the machine, instead of you wasting hours figuring it out and then breaking it anyway.
Actually that’s a (back on topic - Woo! Topic!) point.
Friends. It was, well, okay at the time and while I wasn’t a regular viewer at all, the ongoing stories helped make it interesting when I saw it irregularly at friends’ (sic) places.
Now I just keep thinking that these are awful people behaving in skeevy ways.
Did I drop out of the target audience as I aged, or has the characterisation not aged well? Probably something from ‘a’ and a bit from ‘b’.
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Yes! I’m not the only person who ever watched that show! It was criminal that the CBC cancelled it.
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Hollywood does love to play fast and loose with geography. As much as I love The Blues Brothers, it has all sorts of geographic anomalies that make no sense to a Chicago native who grew up in that era, and some locations (like Bob’s Country Bunker) only existed on a studio backlot.
When I first got a job in downtown Chicago (back in 1989), I got off the train at LaSalle Street Station, looked east on Van Buren, and did a double take at a view that looked exactly as it did in the movie. Almost none of that view survives today.
Back to TV, the most egregious example of geographic hocus-pocus I can think of is one I saw recently: a Mission: Impossible episode, “The Train.” Set in a fictional Eastern European country, all the signs are in a fictional language that looks like someone took English, German, and French and put them in a blender, and the locomotives and rolling stock were quite obviously borrowed from the Union Pacific. It was so cheesy that I had to laugh.
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For me it’s 'my family watches it. I watch my family watching it and watch them nod sagely at whatever subgroup is getting made fun of.
Plus if you’re going to have an opinion of something on tv, look at it. Then decide if you don’t like it.
Personally? I’m just sick of what has become of the history channel.
I loved their ‘biblical’ shows because it gives historic context to everything, which I think is a wonderful thing and my pastor when I was in highschool loved the fact there was programs like that on tv that wasn’t a ‘christian’ network that was full of cringe and bible beating.
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My daughter and I were watching some show set in Kansas City, complete with opening-title-shots of the skyline. So we were a little surprised to see the main characters walking down Colorado Blvd 2 blocks from our house in Pasadena, CA.
And then right after, some crime show set in NYC but they were investigating a crime in the Arroyo Seco, under the Colorado Blvd Bridge. Ironically, it was a suspected suicide. That bridge has been redesigned like 5 times to prevent people jumping off it.
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Cutting those custom knives used to be an everyday part of my job, BTW.
(a long time ago, in a galaxy etc, I was an apprentice wood machinist for a short time; a six-head moulder is a very fun toy to play with)
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I was never a fan of the series but it definitely hadn’t aged well, either. So many sexist and homophobic jokes for one thing. Then there’s the abusiveness in many of their relationships.
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We shot that bridge as three separate crime scenes for three different episodes of The Mentalist (none of them set in Southern California). Once on top looking down (victim had been thrown off, IIRC), once at the bottom looking up, and one memorable time halfway down when someone was threatening suicide from the superstructure. After that, I think we’d milked that location for all we could get out of it without it starting to look overly familiar.
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That’s one thing that always bothered me about the first seasons of The Mentalist - and to that matter many procedurals in California and that’s how travel time across the state is completely ignored.
Hell just going to San Francisco from Sacramento is a huge pain in the ass yet they just go and drive there or Oakland or somewhere in the central valley or LA whatever on a whim and completely ignore the travel time.
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Not just the first seasons… all six of them before the setting shifted to Texas. I didn’t mind so much how much traipsing around they did between Sacramento and the Bay Area, though one does wonder why the fictional version of the California Bureau of Investigation didn’t have more separation between the San Francisco and Sacramento regional offices. They rarely packed a lunch.
But the worst offense took place when Jane asked Lisbon to come with him so he could show her something. “What is it?” “I’ll tell you when we get there.” Cut to them driving up to his old, abandoned house… in Malibu. A 400 mile drive one-way, just to show her his old house like it’s across town or something. And she goes along without question, like it ain’t no thing!
Possibly the weirdest aspect of that show for me was that was one of only two or three times the show took place in or around L.A. I never would have guessed that California’s Central Valley was such a hotbed of supervillain criminal activity.
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