History TelevisionGeography / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/TheBill'': This show is set in East London (albeit a fictional part of it), but filmed in South London, with the frequent result that you see the trains of certain train companies go past that have no business being anywhere near East London (plus the fact that most National Rail lines in East London operate on overhead wires, not third rail). In "Killer on the Run", a character boards a north-bound Northern Line train at Charing Cross, gets off at the next stop and arrives in a mainline rail terminus. You'd have to go a few stops further along to reach one (Euston).

*** While working briefly as a cropduster, Harm commuted daily from Washington to Blacksburg! That's 269 miles each way, according to Google Maps.
* ''Series/{{Justified}}'': Main character Raylan Givens is a US Marshal working out of Lexington, Kentucky. However much of his time is spent investigating people in Harlan County, which he is constantly driving to and from there. In reality, it's about a three-hour drive each way under the best of conditions.

* ''Series/{{Leverage}}'': In the Season 1 episode "The Stork Job", the team take a job in Belgrade, Serbia. However, the city in the establishing shot is Budapest, Hungary, with the Liberty Statue, Buda Castle, and Chain Bridge clearly visible.
** Buda Castle appears again in Season 2, "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job", as the "Museum of Art, Kiev".
* ''Series/LifeUnexpected'': Good news: The producers got pretty much every detail about Portland (the show's setting) correct. [[http://www.platypuscomix.net/fpo/history/luxsux.html Bad news]]: That's pretty much where all the effort went.

*** To be fair, [[RuleOfCool it's a much nicer train station]].

** In "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing," a house catches fire and a young woman is killed. Stottlemeyer says in the alleyway scene that the house is in the same area of the city as the alley dumpster where the fireman's coat and hat were found, which is said to be the Tenderloin. Except the house shown is clearly in a suburban residential neighborhood. The Tenderloin is a rough neighborhood of downtown San Francisco where there are single row occupancy units, not nice homes.
*** Furthermore, the firehouse where Monk is blinded is said to be five blocks from the scene of the fire, but the buildings around the garage in the establishing shot clearly do not look anything like the Tenderloin region, which is also very hilly. In fact, based on the appearance of the surrounding area, it would be more realistic if the firehouse was in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
** "Mr. Monk is On The Run" Part Two depicts Riverton, California as a small town. It's actually just an unincorporated community on US Highway 50.
*** In that same episode, you see Stottlemeyer receive a postcard from Monk, in hiding. The address shown on the card is for the city of San Francisco with the zipcode 90019. That's actually the zipcode for ''Los Angeles''. The actual zip code for the address shown, after checking with the U.S. Postal Service website, is 94105.

* ''Series/{{Newhart}}'': The opening is not filmed in Vermont, but near Squam Lake, New Hampshire.
** Except for the exterior of the inn, which is actually in E. Middlebury, Vt, on the other side of the state from N.H.
* ''Series/TheOfficeUS'': One episode of the US version had the cast visit Lake Scranton for a beach party. There is no beach or sandy shore at Lake Scranton, which is [[http://www.carlabraham.com/Photo%20147.JPG on a hillside and surrounded by trees]], a result of CaliforniaDoubling.

*** On another occasion they visit Stonehenge in Britain. The field in which it's set is supposed to be flat, with a fence surrounding the structure itself and two roads very close by. Neither the roads nor the fence can be seen in the episode and the field is fairly hilly.
*** When launching one particular jet zord from their base in California, Mt. Fuji can be seen in the background.

* ''Series/{{Primeval}}'': Everything happens in or around London, according to their website. Including Episode One, which was set and filmed in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, and is about 130 miles to the west of London.

* ''Series/{{Psych}}'': One episode opens with Shawn telling Chief Vick that's he's going skiing, and she asks where he'd ski in the middle of summer; cut to Whistler, just over a hundred kilometers from Vancouver, with typical summer lows around seven degrees (the resort is used for bikes in the summer). Most of the action takes place in the even warmer seaside Vancouver, because Shawn and Gus went there (again, roughly a hundred kilometers away) upon seeing a criminal instead of going to the Whistler police, for no obvious reason. Even so, everyone acts like it's below freezing for the entire episode, even during the day, when it would likely be around ''twenty''. (That's 20°C which is 68°F)
** Maybe they didn't realize that those temperatures were in Celsius? Maybe they just looked up the weather there and thought it was in Fahrenheit? 'Cause they acted like it was around 20 F.
*** Psych is filmed in Vancouver. So someone should have worked it out.
*** They knew. It was a [[LampshadeHanging lampshade]] on this trope.

** Nominally set in San Francisco, yet clearly actually filmed in Vancouver -- is notorious for this. One memorable example features the nonexistent Van Ness [[http://www.bart.gov/ "BART"]] station.

*** In fairness to the show, however, production was shifted to Hollywood from season three onwards. Cue CaliforniaDoubling (though most of the show still had them basically in California).

* ''Series/StargateSG1'': (filmed in Vancouver) In the episode "Memento Mori", Cameron Mitchell is on a highway presumably in Colorado (as that's where Cheyenne Mountain is). The roadsign says "Surrey", and there's no Surrey in Colorado.
** In fact, every time SG-1 does scenes outside the base and not in generic wilderness invokes this trope. To a Colorado Springs (the city at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain) native, the gas station shots from season 6 episode "Sight Unseen," and to a lesser extent, the whole of season 8 episode "Affinity," shatter the suspension of disbelief. The shots of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex entrance, however, are spot on (being actual footage of the location).
*** The problem with their use of actual footage is that the same truck seems to enter the complex every day for ten years.
** Lampshaded repeatedly both on SG-1 and [[Series/StargateAtlantis Atlantis]] when characters will point out that all of the planets they visit seem to look an awful lot like Canada. Both shows were filmed in and around Vancouver.
*** WordOfGod is that they tried to put a Canadian reference into each episode, because all of it was filmed in Canada.

*** To give benefit of the doubt, if this was the "Scarecrow" episode, Sam got stuck in a bus station somewhere, waiting for the bus to L.A., and we were never told where that bus station was. He might never have actually made it out of the state of Indiana in the first place or perhaps only made it to neighboring Illinois before stealing the car to get back to Dean.

* ''Trial and Retribution'': One episode of this UK crime drama features a character landing at London City Airport. However, the place has grass - the real London City is in the middle of East London and pretty near the Canary Wharf skyscrapers.
** Especially egregious because the main reason anyone flies to London City rather than Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted is because it's handy for the business district.

** The format changed from [=A123XYZ=] (or [=ABC123Z=] if really old) to [=AB51XYZ=] in 2001, and there are still loads of cars with the old registration plate format. Or maybe it was a foreign car, they're not unknown in London?
* ''Series/TheWalkingDead'' later seasons are set in Alexandria, Virginia which looks a lot like the pine woods of Georgia, where the show is filmed. Alexandria is actually a heavily developed suburb of Washington, D.C.
** In Season Ten , the walkers are led over a high cliff and fall into a river, set among high bluffs and forested rolling hills, none of which exists in the D.C. area.
* ''Series/{{Warehouse 13}}'': One Season 1 episode had Peter and Myke travel to Chicago to investigate a series of unusual bank robberies. One outdoor scene showed streetcar tracks and a blue streetsign for York Av., Chicago, like most US cities, abandoned streetcars many years ago, and the streetsigns there are green, not blue. The shot is a dead giveaway for Toronto, where the series [[CaliforniaDoubling is filmed]].

* ''Series/{{Wonderfalls}}'': This short-lived TV show was set in UsefulNotes/NiagaraFalls, New York. Every shot of the waterfall depicted in the show, and the American-side gift shop where the main character works, is from the Ontario side. Additionally, in one episode, they are shown traveling to Canada through a border crossing surrounded by land on all sides, which implies that they drove a few hundred miles northeast or southwest to avoid using any of the Buffalo-Niagara area crossings, all of which involve bridges over the Niagara River.

* ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace'' which depicts the eponymous roadway (in real life, a major street) as some sort of weird pedestrian-only walkway with enough sharp turns, pedestrians, ''stairways'' and a sufficiently narrow width to make it impossible for a car to navigate.

* Pick any Creator/DisneyChannel KidCom. ''[[Franchise/DisneyChannelLiveActionUniverse Any]]''. The most egregious example is perhaps ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace'' which depicts the eponymous roadway (in real life, a major street) as some sort of weird pedestrian-only walkway with enough sharp turns, pedestrians, ''stairways'' and a sufficiently narrow width to make it impossible for a car to navigate.
* The Nickelodeon series ''Series/{{iCarly}}'', set in Seattle, features between-scenes shots of places other than Seattle. For example, the episode iPity The Nevel includes a shot of the intersection of Eliot and Metropolitan Avenues in the New York City borough of Queens. Furthermore, the bridge that Freddie's ambulance is seen driving across in iSaved Your Life is actually the historic DuSable Bridge in Chicago.

** In "Two Bodies in the Lab," Booth gets intel that the bad guy they're after has been spotted going into an abandoned warehouse on "North 23rd St." Except this isn't how DC is set up; it's divided into quadrant (Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, Southeast) and directions are given depending on what quadrant they're in. He could have gone into a warehouse on "23rd St. NW," but not "North 23rd." Booth is also missing--and doesn't ask for--the alphabetical cross-street that would be necessary to narrow down exactly ''where'' on 23rd St. they're going (i.e. "23rd and N, NW").

* ''Series/{{Bones}}'': Happens occasionally on this show, which is set in DC but filmed in California. This leads to such geographical wackiness as the team visiting a racetrack in the middle of what appears to be a desert...in Virginia.

* ''Series/{{Glee}}'': One could sit here all day listing everything the show gets wrong about UsefulNotes/{{Ohio}}. Even if we limit the discussion to geography alone, the state must be significantly smaller in tv-land. The show is set in Lima in Northwest Ohio near the Indiana border, but characters leisurely drive to and from cities that are nowhere near it in real life. Westerville, the home of Dalton Academy, is a suburb of Columbus in central Ohio, and Akron, home of Vocal Adrenaline, is near Cleveland in the northeast. Both would be a two-hour drive barring traffic, bad weather, or construction (this being Ohio, you're lucky if you only hit one), and not even mentioning Lima doesn't have directly connecting interstate highways eastward outside of the slower U.S. Highway 30. Of course, the 'bad side' of Lima, known in the show as Lima Heights Adjacent, doesn't exist, as Lima really doesn't have any heights unless you look up from the east side's rock quarries, and outside of a couple townships, no other towns are adjacent to Lima.