Artistic License Geography / Live-Action TV

• On 30 Rock, Kenneth Parcell describes his hometown of Stone Mountain, Georgia as full of hillbillies. While such towns do exist in Georgia, the real-life Stone Mountain is a middle-class, predominantly-black suburb of Atlanta.
• Boy Meets World is set in Philadelphia, despite looking nothing like the real city. It's possible, however, that the show takes place in one of the city's suburbs like Montgomeryville or Ardmore.
• Several episodes of CNNNN and The Chaser's War On Everything have featured Julian or Firth talking with Americans on the street and exposing poor general knowledge about the world. One memorable segment had people being asked which country the US should attack next in the War on Terror. Thanks to deliberately mislabeled maps, at least three people thought the country they'd chosen was located in Australia (specifically, Iran, France and North Korea (with Tasmania representing South Korea)).
  • Another segment had Julian ask how many Eiffel Towers Paris had; one person suggested that there were ten of them. There's only one Eiffel Tower in Paris. But there are quite a few replicas of it all around the world.
• Da Vinci's Demons has several ships sailing across the Atlantic from Italy to the New World, and landing in some jungle apparently right beside the Andes... which would be those mountains in the western side of South America.
• Sons of Anarchy:
  • The show is set in the in the fictional town of Charming, California, a short distance away from Lodi, which would place it in the San Joaquin Valley. Shots of people riding around the surrounding country roads frequently feature hilly landscapes, but the San Joaquin Valley is flat, being a valley and all.
  • Characters frequently ride around Northern California, often to their destination and back before sunset. It takes at least 4 hours to travel from the Lodi area to places like Redding and Red Bluff.
  • The state prison and DOJ facility in Stockton are fictional.
• It has been observed that the journey across Manchester in Car Share takes anything but the shortest line between two points. This is possibly due to the vagaries of shooting and re-shooting dialogue scenes, and a not unreasonable assumption that the vast majority of viewers will not have local knowledge of Greater Manchester streets and landmarks and will in any case be looking at the characters and not the backgrounds. The journey taken in Episode One was observed to go round in circles, double back on itself, meander miles to the north and miles to the south of the assumed destination, leap instantly between locations as if the car was a Tardis, and in one scene it appeared to visit a completely different town sixty miles away from Manchester. Although the show lampshaded Peter's inability to use a SatNav and his lack of any maps in the car...
• In an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Dee describes running down Spring Garden Street, through Fairmount Park, in order to get to Paddy's Pub which is in South Philly. Feel free to look at a map of Philadelphia and try to figure out how that works. Spring Garden Street runs east-west through Center City and is located south of Fairmount Park.
• I Love Lucy.
  • Lucy thinks that Ricky is homesick and decides to make over the house to look like "home". Ricky is Cuban, but she makes the house over to look more like Mexico (complete with sombrero-and-poncho stereotypes a la Speedy Gonzales). They both speak Spanish and are in the same general area, so, bless her heart, she was close, but then comes out and sings a song dressed as Carmen Miranda, who was a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian. Wrong continent, wrong language, wrong hemisphere.
  • Lucy and Ricky's address for as long as they live in New York City is 623 E. 68th Street. In real life, that would be somewhere in the East River. (Although this is likely intentional. Many shows use deliberately fake addresses and phone numbers so the real places aren't constantly hassled by fans and pranksters.)
• Justified: The show seems to think that Raylan can just make a quick drive from Lexington to Harlan County, Kentucky, a few times a day. The two are about a 3-4 hour drive apart.^note The US Marshals office to which Raylan is assigned, which include Harlan County, is indeed based in Lexington. That office has two other potential duty stations that are considerably closer to Harlan (the county seat). However, even those are at least 1½ hours from Harlan (London to the west, Pikeville to the northeast).
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 has too many to count, mostly in service of comedy. Besides the Running Gag that any town in the U.S. is Circle Pines, Minnesota, one of the most overt appears in "Soultaker", the Season 10 premiere — at the time the episode was written, a restaurant called The Hot Fish Shop existed — but it was in Winona, not Osseo (a distance of about 130 miles). It also closed the weekend before the episode premiered. Oh well...
• 24
  • An important plot point in Season 4 occurs near the mountains of Iowa. Take a good look at this topographic map◊ of Iowa. See any mountains? The highest point in the state is a little under 1,700 feet above sea level. (In fairness, the Midwest in general is rather generous with its use of the word "mountain"; the St. Francois Mountains in Missouri, which contain the highest point in the state, have a maximum elevation of 1772 feet.)
  • The real-time gimmick gets it into a lot of trouble geographically. Just one example: in the final season, set in NYC, Jack is in Middle Village, Queens and tells Chloe he's 10 minutes away from Houston Street. Maybe if he traveled by helicopter; Houston Street, in downtown Manhattan, is about 40 minutes’ drive, and that’s without the notoriously bad traffic in the area. Trying to decipher the geography of 24 is an exercise in futility.
• The first season of western Hell on Wheels is set in Iowa. At the end of one episode, the two leading men ride into the sunset with mountains behind them, to the east.
• Lost claimed that the discovery of the missing Oceanic airliner in the waters off Bali would allay suspicion. Bali is so utterly off course from the plane's planned flight path (several thousand miles in a completely wrong direction) that even in the weird universe of Lost, it would raise alarms. This is pointed out in extra on the season 4 DVD box set
  • Shot in Hawaii for the tropical setting of the survivors' beach encampment, many other locations supposedly set on the continental United States and other locations are still shot in Hawaii.
  • In "Hearts and Minds" a flashback shows Boone staying in a hotel room in Sydney with a view of the Sydney Opera House which would only be possible if the room was in the middle of the Harbour directly over the water.
• The West Wing
  • The 9/11 episode refers to a terrorism suspect entering the United States via the "Ontario/Vermont border." It is Quebec, not Ontario, that borders Vermont.
  • The episode "Two Cathedrals" has the presidential motorcade driving past the National Cathedral to get from the White House to the State Department, which has to be a detour of at least 20 minutes.
  • In the first episode of the first season, there's a scene with Mandy driving fast in her convertible around the National Mall while having an argument on her cell phone. Now to the show's credit, this one was filmed on location. However, anyone familiar with the layout of the National Mall quickly realizes that Mandy's car either magically flew backwards between cuts or she for some reason made a full circuit of the Mall (which would probably take at least five minutes, even going 60 or so in some sort of Bizzaroland where there is apparently no other traffic). Also unrealistic is the fact that she was going about 60 miles per hour on Jefferson Drive, and yet does not appear to have bits of jaywalking tourists and school groups lodged in the grille of her cute convertible.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?.
  • Drew Carey once said that "Africa is a big country." The rest of the cast mercilessly ragged on him about it for the rest of the episode.
  • During one "Scenes From a Hat" where the topic was "Unlikely State License Plates", Colin Mochrie gave "Miami: The Land That Time Remembered." When Drew buzzed and reminded him Miami is a city, not a state, Colin changed it to "Florida: Not to Be Confused with Miami."
• There was once a special episode of CSI that took place in Detroit, but was quite obviously filmed in Los Angeles. Many of us have been to Detroit to point out that there are no palm trees lining the streets of Detroit; also, it'd be hard to find mountains on the horizon.
  • In another, the crime lab has to send some people up to Carson City to secure some evidence. They arrive in the middle of a blinding sandstorm, something that any person who lives in Carson City would tell you doesn't happen.
• In the pilot of the short-lived series Smith, there are a number of howlers. The alley out of which one character staggers to distract the cops, for instance, is downtown and a good five miles from the building the group is supposedly robbing—which is itself represented on the exterior by a completely different building. Then the crooks make their getaway in a boat that goes down the wrong river, and stops about 50 yards before they would have gone over a dam.
• Carly's grandfather in iCarly lives in Yakima and commented on why he can't drive a hour-and-a-half to Seattle to see his grandchildren. Driving from Seattle to Yakima takes about two more hours than he claims.
• In the series finale of Sisters, which took place in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, a man tells a taxi driver to "Take the Kennedy to Sheridan Road." Those roads/highways are not connected in real life.^note "Kennedy" refers to the Kennedy Expressway, which runs northwest from The Loop (downtown) to O'Hare Airport. The closest that Sheridan Road gets to it is about 3 miles.
• Invoked In-Universe during a Quiz Bowl in the City Guys episode "Keep on the Download". Manny High's team (consisting of Dawn, Al and El-Train, the latter two of whom replaced Cassidy and Martin after they quit due to Dawn's rigid teaching) is asked, "in which Dakota is Mount Rushmore located?" El-Train's answer?...
  El-Train (with confidence): East Dakota!^note For reference, there is no U.S. state with the word "east" at the beginning of its name. The only U.S. states with a direction in their name are North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota (the correct answer to the above question) and West Virginia. There are also no states with omnidirectional names (i.e., "northeast," "southwest") in their name.
  Dawn: No! No, that's not our answer!
  Ms. Noble: Sorry, I said I could only accept one answer and that answer, East Dakota, is very, very wrong.
• Happy Days seems to take place in a Milwaukee where mountains and palm trees populate the landscape (especially in the opening credits), along with California housing styles which never went near Wisconsin.
• Fox News Channel broadcast a map of the Middle East with Iraq labeled as Egypt◊.
  • They also illustrated a story about the 2008 conflict between the country of Georgia and Russia with a road map of, ooops, wrong Georgia, leading to some confusion as they talked about advancing Russian tanks.
  • They also placed Sydney, Australia on the north coast of Australia during their 2011 Tsunami coverage.
    • CNN also had a blunder covering the same story (which The Daily Show called them out on) where they called the Galapagos Islands "Hawaii".
• In Season 1 of Heroes, Sylar visited a man in Virginia Beach, VA. A quick peek outside the door revealed rocky hills, scrub, and lots of dust. Viewers in coastal Virginia rolled their eyes.
• An episode of MSNBC's To Catch a Predator was set in Riverside, California, but all of the wrap-around shots were from Huntington Beach, which is 50 miles away from Riverside. This might be okay, except that several shots featured the Huntington Beach Pier. Riverside has several things between the city and the ocean, including several other cities and a mountain range.
• Jericho (2006) seems to forget that Kansas is bigger than Rhode Island. Throughout the series, characters see mountains from Central Kansas (mountains are not visible from anywhere in Kansas), travel less than an hour to drive over 500 miles from Wichita to Denver and act like Topeka is next door. (There are approximately 140 miles and several towns between the two.)
• The made-for-TV Olsen sisters' film Passport to Paris had a huge blooper. An animation sequence showed their plane crossing over the Atlantic, flying over London, then over the Channel, then over France and the Mediterranean sea to eventually land somewhere in North Africa. The Channel is not the Mediterranean Sea.
• Spenser For Hire was filmed in the Boston area, but the editing made Boston-area viewers giggle as a chase would jump towns just by turning a corner. This was especially amusing when the towns involved were separated by several other towns.
• Hilariously lampshaded in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street when scenes supposed to be in Pennsylvania were shot in a distinctive area of Ellicott City, Maryland. The characters mention every few minutes that they're in Whatevertown, Pennsylvania. (The show was filmed on location in Baltimore and was fairly popular there.)
• It happens from time to time on The Amazing Race, what with teams traveling all over the world and all, but never so gloriously as in the Season 16 premiere, when Jordan, despite constantly being reminded that they were going to Chile, proceeds to request tickets to Santiago, China.
• In British magician Derren Brown's one-off show The Gathering he performed a trick whereby he predicted which country somebody would think of out of all of the countries in the world. The "country" he predicted? Africa. He was correct. (Is this a failure on the part of him, or the audience member?)
• QI. One example being a question about the smallest English county — expected "wrong" answer being Rutland, with the "correct" answer being the Isle of Wight, which apparently has a smaller area at the relevant tidemark. Unfortunately, in traditional terms the Isle of Wight isn't a county (it's part of Hampshire, and Rutland was the smallest traditional county), and in modern terms, both the reinstated Rutland and the IoW are unitary authorities — the smallest of which is Blackpool.
  • The traditional counties are counties which used to exist but don't necessarily still exist or have their original boundaries. A unitary authority, while being for most purposes a county in all but name, is still considered for ceremonial purposes to be part of a county. Hence the entities known as Ceremonial Counties, which are the current officially existing counties, which have the ceremonial institutions of a county such as a Lord Lieutenant and which may govern all their own territory, or alternatively some or even all of their territory may be under the control of unitary authorities. In any case, QI was wrong because the City of London is a separate Ceremonial County in its own right, not part of Greater London.
  • In one episode, Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert seemed completely unable to comprehend that Denmark and Norway are not the same place, repeatedly claiming Denmark gets no sunlight in winter despite being told multiple times that it doesn't by an increasingly annoyed Sandi Toksvig (who is Danish). Alan Davies cuts the tension beautifully when he tells the Welshman, "Denmark's the same latitude as Scotland. You know, where you're from!"
• The Soap Opera The Young and the Restless featured a storyline where a character faked his own death and escaped Wisconsin. Then he went to Ottawa. Then he went to Brazil. So his father followed him to Ottawa on a vengeance mission. Apparently, Ottawa is some harbour-front dive-down, inhabited by rednecks in cowboy shirts.^note The real Ottawa, which is Canada's capital, is regarded as a fairly dreary place full of bureaucrats with no nightlife to speak of. It is on a river — the Ottawa River — but it's considerably inland from any lake (which is why it was chosen as Canada's capital, because in 1867 it was the major city farthest from the American border). In order to enter Ottawa, you have to parachute out of a clunker aeroplane. And then, another character follows the father to Ottawa. By chartering a boat. From Wisconsin. While geographically possible, it still requires a detour through four lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
• Friends:
  • In "The One with Joey's Big Break", while he and Chandler are driving out of Manhattan for Las Vegas, the (rather grainy) bridge is obviously the Queensboro Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects Manhattan to Queens, but after Joey kicks out Chandler for saying the movie won't be his break, the Orbital Shot is of the Manhattan Bridge, also spanning the East River but connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. At the coffee shop, Chandler mentions it was the George Washington Bridge, which would have been correct as it crosses the Hudson and connects Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey.
  • Phoebe had a scientist boyfriend called David, who went to Minsk on a research trip. Minsk is stated to be in Russia several times, while it actually is the capital of Belarus.
  • Friends seemed to live in a strange, compressed geography that takes its characters anywhere they need to go in about twenty minutes. This compression also seems to extend to other places. On "TOW The Girl From Poughkeepsie" Ross falls asleep on the train and wakes up in Montreal. He meets a young woman who says from there "it's only a two-hour ferry ride to Nova Scotia." Actually, it's another six hours to get to St. John's, NL,^note Newfoundland and Labrador and THEN a two-hour ferry ride to NS.
• In How I Met Your Mother, when Robin speaks of how she met her Argentinean boyfriend Gael, it shows how they first got involved in a secluded little beach-side cabin surrounded by palm trees, a beach that looks oddly Caribbean. Argentina's beaches are all on the Atlantic, and you're more likely to find pine trees than anything even slightly resembling Robin's flashback. This is probably to do with how Ted is telling it.
• In an episode of Have I Got News for You, Angus Deaton describes a US event has happening in "Carolina". Evidently the HIGNFY writers (or one the newspapers they got the story from) didn't realize that the state name was North Carolina, and it wasn't a phrasing analogous to how you might say something happened in "north(ern) France". Perhaps their confusion was reinforced by the common North Carolinian habit of referring to that state as "Carolina".
• In 90210, Oscar figures out that there is something suspicious about rapist Mr. Cannon when he claims to be from Chelsea but clearly has a Dagenham accent. Now, while Chelsea has many upper-class parts to it, there are also several working-class areas as well. There is no way that anybody could identify a "Dagenham accent" as opposed to any other working-class area of London. But just try convincing Henry Higgins of that.
• The US version of Shameless had a character drive from Chicago to Detroit to Toronto and then back to Chicago during the span of a single night. It takes about 9–10 hours to make that drive one way, not counting any delays at the border. The dialogue suggests that they thought that Toronto was just across the river from Detroit. It's not. Windsor is directly across the Detroit River from Detroit. Toronto is more-or-less across Lake Ontario from Buffalo, New York, almost 300 miles and four hours of non-stop, absolute-speed-limit driving further east from Detroit.
• On one of the early episodes of GoGo Sentai Boukenger has the team traveling to Canada looking for the Power Item of the week. The Area that they head to is located in south-eastern Saskatchewan (known for being mostly flatland with some hills), yet features a huge Mountain range and obviously Japanese Flora. South-western Alberta might have been a better call on that one, what with the Rockies in all.
• In The Event Vicky describes Murmansk as being in "Western Siberia." This could be a in-show mistake, but Murmansk is near the Finnish border in the most northwestern part of Russia, further west than Moscow (similar to saying Maine is in the Eastern part of the Old West).^note  Siberia isn't a well defined area, but everyone agrees that it is east of the Urals. Murmansk, on the other hand, is west of the Urals.
• 1967 western Cimarron Strip was filmed in a variety of places, including Utah and Southern California — both of which look nothing like the Oklahoma panhandle, where it purportedly took place; where the real "Cimarron Strip" is flat and covered in prairie grass, the show's version is mountainous and sandy.
• Torchwood: Miracle Day has the main characters arrive in Venice, California on their way to a location in Los Angeles. When asked by the Gwen, the Welsh character where their final destination is, the American character Esther answers that it's technically in another city: Los Angeles while they're in Venice. Venice is part of the City of Los Angeles. It's also a plot point in Miracle Day that Shanghai and Buenos Aires are antipodes. According to Google Maps, that's about 150 miles off.
• Viewers who are familiar with Kansas can never watch Smallville without smirking at how much greener, hillier, and wetter the in-show Kansas is compared to the real-world Kansas, and how much the in-show Kansas looks like the Vancouver area. Metropolis is within visual range and an hour or two's drive from Smallville. It has a waterfront. The nearest ocean to Kansas is the Gulf of Mexico, over 400 miles away through Oklahoma and Texas. The nearest major water body is Lake Michigan, through Missouri and Illinois. It might be a large river, but there are none of those in Kansas, barring the Missouri, and the water establishing shots is pretty clearly too wide to be that. Oddly enough, Vancouver has docks as well. Even in the DC Universe this is artistic license. In the comics, Metropolis is in Delaware, which you might notice is nowhere near Kansas.
• On one episode of JAG, Harm's partner is kidnapped by gangbangers in South Central L.A. They tell Harm to drive back to Camp Pendleton, grab one of their members who has joined the Marines, and bring him back in one hour. Camp Pendleton is 90 miles from Los Angeles — even with no traffic it would be extremely difficult to make the drive down there in one hour, let alone back.
  • In several episodes they also drive awfully fast from Washington, D.C. to both Norfolk and Blacksburg in Virginia. Norfolk is in the southeast corner of Virginia, about 3 hours and change from DC without traffic delays. Blacksburg is near the western end of Virginia, about 4 hours from DC and even farther from Norfolk.
• In one episode of Law & Order the evidence trail led to Lenny calling the Newburgh Arena in that city in the Hudson Valley. He says "what do they have going on there? Deer ticks?" In actuality, Newburgh is a city with almost 30,000 people and, at time, enough street crime to make Lenny appreciate his job in Manhattan. Justified, because the assumption that all of upstate is extremely rural and that life there is altogether uneventful is an entirely realistic depiction of the attitudes of people from the city.
  • On the other hand, Newburgh is located in Orange County, which has one of the highest rates of Lyme disease of any county in the United States.
• In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard sits in a cafe in Paris with the Eiffel Tower behind his table. He then gets up, turns in a different direction to look at the view... with the Eiffel Tower in the background. This could be somewhat forgiven as it takes place on the holodeck.
• Star Trek: Enterprise has an attack that etches a swath of destruction 4000 kilometers long, stated to be all the way from Florida to Venezuela. 4000 kilometers would indeed reach all the way from the northwestern corner of Florida almost all the way across Venezuela, but it starts in lower central Florida and proceeds almost due south, which is accurately shown to cut across Cuba and Panama (and, by extension, well into the Pacific Ocean). Unless at least Columbia and Panama got folded into Venezuela, it's not exactly on the way.
• Monk:
  • Though set in San Francisco, this show was mostly filmed in Los Angeles. This was painfully evident in "Mr. Monk Is Up All Night" when Monk goes to a train station and it's obviously Los Angeles Union Station, not the Fourth and King Street Station. So one wonders just how far he wandered off into the night. It's a much nicer train station, but still...
  • "Mr. Monk and the Other Detective" has a body being dumped near the San Bruno Caltrain station. On screen, the body is found in a hilly wooded area. You couldn't possibly really hide a body near the real San Bruno Caltrain or BART stations, as they sit in the middle of very dense neighborhoods, on flat ground, with no palm trees.
  • 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 and apartment buildings, 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 zip code 90019. That's actually a zip code for Los Angeles. The actual zip code for the address shown, after checking with the U.S. Postal Service website, is 94105.
  • Likewise, in "Mr. Monk Goes to a Rock Concert", there is no valley close to San Francisco inside the SFPD jurisdiction that would match the area where the concert grounds are. A nice aversion comes if you notice that there is a postcard in Greg Murray's trailer addressed to a postal box with an actual San Francisco zip code (94188).
  • Monk's apartment in the series and in the novels is said to be on Pine Street a few blocks west of Van Ness Boulevard. However, the stock establishing shots show his apartment as being on the southeast corner of Taylor Street and Broadway, far removed from Pine Street.
  • The cover art of the novel Mr. Monk on Patrol gets this. The novel starts in San Francisco, takes place primarily in Summit, New Jersey, but the police car on the cover art is clearly a Chicago Police Department vehicle (Monk being positioned so as to hide the word "CHICAGO" on the car's doors).
• In one episode of Vegas (2012) Sheriff Lamb establishes himself as a badass by throwing a suspect through a window in downtown Las Vegas (as indicated by the establishing shot of the Golden Nugget). However, the suspect lands near the sign for the Stardust, several miles away on the Las Vegas strip. It's probably best not to wonder why the casino even has windows on the ground floor in the first place.
• Glee was notorious for getting various details about Ohio wrong. For instance, almost all the towns mentioned in the show are real places, and none of them are anywhere near each other even though characters leisurely travel from one town to the next all the time. The show is mainly set in Lima near the Indiana border; rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline is based in Akron, 154 miles away on the opposite end of the state. Then there are the boys from Dalton Academy in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus and 90 miles from Lima. The show implies that all these places are a short drive from each other rather than the all-day trip that they actually are.
• The Office (US), set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and filmed in Los Angeles, frequently shows palm trees and LA's surrounding mountains in the background in exterior shots (the title sequence is actual footage of Scranton, filmed by John Krasinski, and the show is actually quite faithful to the location otherwise).
  • In the episode Employee Transfer, the fact that Nashua is a seven hour drive from Scranton is a major factor in Michael and Holly's breakup, but Nashua is barely a five hour drive from Scranton, seven hours will get you all the way to Augusta, Maine, which becomes doubly amusing when they arrive at the halfway point (four hours) and it's an overgrown forest, whereas halfway between them would put the driver in the middle of Connecticut (Danbury is roughly halfway between Scranton and Nashua) and four hours would be nearly to Boston. Notable for the fact that the Office is usually pretty good about driving times.
• ER has a rather nebulous idea of the location of Cook County Hospital. Some exterior shots place it near the Chicago River where it intersects with Michigan Avenue. Others have it well south of the Loop. And the actual hospital is on the West Side, miles away from either location.
• Wizards of Waverly Place
  • Most things regarding New York locations. For example, in the episode with a flying carpet, they are badly superimposed over Manhattan, where they see Shea Stadium. Shea Stadium, when it existed, was very much in Queens.
  • Not only that Waverly Place itself is about a two block street just off Washington Square by NYU, at least the portion that is east of Washington Square Park, and this portion is definitely nothing like the SoCal-icized location shown. It does continue west of the park, however, for several blocks well into the West Village, and the set depicted on the show appears to be a somewhat plausible fictionalization of Waverly Place in the West Village. Not overly so, but at the very least, it's probably intended that the Russos live on Waverly Place somewhere in the West Village, as opposed to the eastern portion of it, which in reality is bounded by nothing but NYU buildings and one or two non-NYU apartment buildings.
  • The most egregious error regarding the actual depiction of Waverly Place is that it's shown as a pedestrian mall/walkway, complete with a staircase in the middle of it just before the entrance to the Waverly Sub Station. The real Waverly Place is a major thoroughfare for car traffic, like any other major street in a large city. Such a blatant error was probably done to make the set more friendly for television production.
  • Additionally, the area surrounding the baseball field in the episode "The Supernatural" has a little too much fauna (and not exactly specific to Downstate New York) to be located anywhere in the five boroughs.
• One episode of Murder, She Wrote referred to a character coming from someplace "twenty miles east of Sheboygan, Wisconsin." Which would place it in the middle of Lake Michigan. And no, there are no inhabited islands in the vicinity. (There is a Cheboygan—pronounced the same—MICHIGAN, almost directly opposite from the Wisconsin town. Perhaps the writers were confused by that.)
  • Doesn't help. 20 miles east of there would still be underwater, just in Lake Huron instead.
• In the San Francisco season of The Real World, two of the housemates fly into Nashville and (apparently) rent a car to pick up Jon, who lived in Owensboro, Kentucky, so they can go to SF together. However, the next shot, shown before they get to Jon's house, makes no sense to anyone familiar with the geography of the western end of the state. The shot shows a sign on westbound Interstate 24 near Eddyville. Take your pick:
  • They took the wrong road out of Nashville, sending them northwest toward St. Louis, with Owensboro about 100 miles northeast of their then-current location.
  • The shot was taken while they were on their way from Owensboro to SF — which makes even less sense, as anyone who would plan on taking that trip would almost certainly start by crossing the Ohio River into Indiana and then picking up I-64.
• The X-Files is a regular offender with, e.g. characters driving from Washington, DC to New York City in under three hours.
  • In the episode "Ghouli", allegedly set in the major port city of Norfolk, Virginia, a few scenes show mountains on the horizon. The nearest mountain range, the Blue Ridge (part of the Appalachian chain), is inland, halfway across the state.
• Invoked in a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Running Gag, in which John mentions a country, saying "a country you think about so little...", and then revealing that the map graphic he's using is highlighting the wrong country (exposing the viewers' unfamiliarity with such countries).
  • It started with his segment on smoking, in which John brings up a graphic of South America with Uruguay highlighted. He then points out that most of his viewers know so little about the country, they didn't realize he's actually highlighted Paraguay, at which point the highlight switches to the correct country.
  • The joke is repeated with Bolivia in the next week's segment on judicial elections, highlighting two wrong countries before moving to the right one and lampshading that it will always be funny. Perhaps because they reused the same graphic and didn't think to adjust it, the background flag is that of Uruguay.
  • And repeated again with Venezuela, this time going through several wrong countries before revealing that he actually had it right the first time, but now that the viewers know the joke, they didn't realize it.
  • Done again with Nebraska. In a segment on the abolition of the death penalty in Nebraska, he first highlights South Dakota before switching to the correct state. He rightfully scolds the audience for not knowing the geography of their own country.
  • Repeated once again with Azerbaijan. This time, the false Azerbaijan he initially highlighted wasn't even a land mass, but a body of water, upping the element of surprise.
  • Repeated yet again with Guatemala. This time he just shows a map with nothing highlighted at all, and tells us to just look it up for ourselves if we want to know which country Guatemala is.
  • When discussing the 2015 Canadian elections, the joke is subverted, as instead of showing a map, John refers to Canada as "the country you think about so little, that's it. End of sentence."
  • In the introduction of the segment about the release of the Panama Papers,^note Documents that revealed prominent individuals with offshore accounts in the Central American nation the false Panama shown is a rough outline of a Scottie dog, which the actual country shown afterward strangely resembles.
  • In his student film on special districts, he has the kids pull this with the Nile in Egypt.
  • When he returns to the gag in Season 4 at the start of his segment about the Bolivian "Zebras for Road Safety" program, he does a particularly elaborate version of it:
  John Oliver: Bolivia. A country you think about so little, you haven't realized that's not Bolivia, it's Colombia. Except no, it's not, it's Venezuela, this is Colombia; no, it's not, that's actually Bolivia. Where's Colombia? No one knows!
• Fargo: Luverne, being in southwest Minnesota, is a prairie town in Real Life. The show, however, regularly portrays Luverne with lots of pine forests — a feature of the northeastern part of the state.
  • In "Loplop," Peggy tells Constance that "We're southwest... Near Vermilion? The lake." The lake actually sits on the Boundary Waters (the border with Canada) and would be a long day's drive northeast from Luverne, not to mention a far cry from Sioux Falls.
• NCIS:
  • A few episodes make reference to Shenandoah National Park, but the terrain and scenery don't match the real thing.
  • One episode has them in a trailer park in Arlington, Virginia, an area with no trailer parks.
  • The season six finale features scenes at an airfield in Israel clearly shot at Sacramento. Look for the USCG Hercules behind Ziva at the end.
  • In another episode, where Tony pretends to be a convict to trace artifacts smuggled out of Iraq, they end up in a storage facility across the street from the Walmart in Lynchburg, Virginia; such a facility doesn't exist due to railroad tracks.
  • Another episode has members of the team follow a lead in Arizona. In clear view behind them when talking to a local cop: Kirk's Rock.
  • An episode from season 9 ends with the team racing to a football stadium to stop an attack on some high-ranking military members in attendance. The overhead shot of the stadium is of the venue now known as TIAA Bank Field, which is in Jacksonville, Florida.
  • One episode features Gibbs and Ziva driving down a wide boulevard with steep-sided hills covered in dried grass and rock outcroppings in the near background. Such hills are common in the Los Angeles basin, but would be much further away and covered in trees in Virginia where the episode is supposed to take place.
  • The team is often seen canvasing the scene of a crime somewhere in DC or the surrounding area. Anyone who knows DC will know that there are absolutely NO art deco bridges. Los Angeles, however, is littered with them.
• The Walking Dead (2010) from Season 5B on is set in Northern Virginia, yet, like seasons 1-4 is still filmed in Georgia. The characters are roaming around what is supposed to be Alexandria, Virginia, which is depicted as heavily wooded rural areas, scattered solitary warehouses, two-lane roads with forest on both sides, and the occasional farm. The fact they are near Washington, D.C., their original goal is never mentioned and why they never head into the city is ever brought up. Alexandria in real life is a heavily developed and urbanized part of the nation's capital, filled with housing developments, towns, government facilities, a major highway (I-495 of the Capital Beltway cuts through it) and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a major domestic hub, nearby.
• Gilmore Girls has a brief example in "Like Mother, Like Daughter" when Luke and Lorelai debate the fastest way to get from Stars Hollow to Connecticut. Lorelai mentions taking I-5, which is an interstate on the other side of the country.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: in the pilot episode Sarah and John Connor move from West Fork, Nebraska to Red Valley, New Mexico.
  • There is an area called Red Valley in New Mexico, but it certainly does not look like a 'hicktown'.
  • There is no place called West Fork in Nebraska.
• Marvel's Netflix universe:
  • Daredevil (2015) takes place in Hell's Kitchen, but is filmed in Brooklyn and Queens.^note The justification is that Hell's Kitchen is worse off because of damage from "The Incident". It causes the occasional slip-up, like:
    • The warehouse where Matt holes up with Vladimir in "Condemned" is said to be at the northwest corner of 47th Street and 12th Avenue. That would be impossible as 12th Avenue at Hell's Kitchen is the West Side Highway, as opposed to a regular street. On the opposite side of the street from the buildings is the USS Intrepid Museum, which is not visible in any shots. The West Side Highway is also eight lanes at this point, not a two-lane road with buildings on both sides. This part of Hell's Kitchen is also primarily residential buildings, and no industrial warehouses.
    • "Bang" opens with a Walk and Talk of Matt and Foggy walking to work, ostensibly in Hell's Kitchen. However, a street sign for East 116th Street appears in the background, betraying the Upper East Side filming location.
    • The location of Karen's hometown Fagan Corners, Vermont is never stated. The newspaper article on her brother's death in "Seven Minutes in Heaven" reports that he^note actually Karen. Kevin was riding shotgun had been "heading east on Vermont Route 12 from the Hill Road exit ramp off Interstate 89". Vermont Route 12 is a north-south highway that runs parallel to Interstate 89 for much of its length, with the two highways only crossing at the state capital in Montpelier. There's also no direct off-ramp between VT-12 and I-89. There also is no Windler County in Vermont, as Montpelier is in Washington County. Some of this could be justified by the fact that Fagan Corners is a fictional town.
    • Early in "Into the Ring", Foggy meets with Sgt. Brett Mahoney as Brett emerges from what is supposed to be the 50th Street station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line. The entrance signage on the stairwell is accurate, but the landscape of the surrounding buildings isn't. The area around 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in the show is depicted as low-rises that don't exceed five stories at most. In reality, this stretch of Eighth Avenue is primarily composed of highrises exceeding 20 stories. That is actually the entrance to Bedford Avenue on the BMT Canarsie Line with the real signs being temporarily replaced.
    • In one episode, Matt tells Elektra that he's never been north of 116th street. Considering he has a degree from Columbia Law, he has to have been, at some point, at least a few hundred feet north of 116th Street.
  • Jessica Jones (2015)
    • In one episode, Jessica very briefly follows Wendy Ross-Hogarth from Tompkins Square Park to a subway entrance at 34th Street — Herald Square, which is 25–30 blocks away. They end up on the subway platform for Lower East Side — Second Avenue on the IND Sixth Avenue Line, which is a few miles and several stops away on the Lower East Side, and which is clearly being filmed on the PATH platforms at 33rd Street.
    • There is no intersection of a Birch Street and a Higgins Drive anywhere in the New York City area. Jessica's childhood house is actually located in the outer Queens neighborhood of Douglaston at 15 Prospect Avenue.
  • Luke Cage (2016)
    • Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes' main stash house is the Crispus Attucks Community Center. While many schools, parks, theaters, playgrounds, and community centers have been named in honor of the Boston Massacre victim, none of those various establishments are located in Harlem like the series suggests.
    • The show seems to imply that Claire Temple and Luke Cage drive from New York to Georgia in what seems to be a single day and drive back in about the same amount of time. That's at least 12 straight hours of nonstop driving on Interstate 95, assuming they never stop for gas, sleep, food, or restroom breaks. And that's also before factoring in the inevitable traffic congestion in the metropolitan areas along the way (Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington^note Although these two can be bypassed via the New Jersey Turnpike, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Richmond).
• The Punisher (2017): The caption when Rawlins is introduced in episode 5 says the CIA headquarters is in Fairfax, Virginia, not Langley's where it's actually based. Though Langley is in Fairfax County, it's far from the city of Fairfax (which lies within but is separate from Fairfax County) or even the area served by the Fairfax post office.
• There's a Columbo episode set in London, which ends with Columbo leaving "the wax museum" (obviously meant to be Madame Tussauds) and crossing a road to the Royal Albert Hall, which is miles away. Although it might possibly have been a fictional wax museum in Kensington.
• The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "The Asset" bizarrely and insultingly depicted Malta as a developing-world rogue state whose dictatorial government was in the pocket of a millionaire Diabolical Mastermind. In fact, Malta is a developed country, a democracy, and a full member of the European Union (which dialogue in the episode specifically denied). It's hard to see why they didn't make up a Ruritania^note presumably, the episode would have been set in Latveria if it wasn't for the fact that, at the time, Fox still owned the rights to the Fantastic Four, which would've included Latveria.
• The Strain has a plot line running through Season 2 where Setrakian does business with a gang operating out of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd on Roosevelt Island. While there is such a church, the show places it under the Queensboro Bridge, whereas in reality it's significantly further north.
• Emmerdale had a police officer informing the family of a missing person that Interpol had told them that the body of a man had been found "at a harbour in Prague" - the capital of the landlocked Czech Republic.
• In an episode of The King of Queens, Doug and Carrie Heffernan go on a holiday elsewhere in the USA having chosen a direction at random. They are next seen driving along Highway 28, which runs through Oregon in the Pacific Northwest. A scene or two later, Doug is seen conferring with a local as to the best route: to stay on 28 or to take the intersection to Highway 414. The problem is... Highway 414 runs several hundred miles to the east of 28, in the Rocky Mountain state of Wyoming. It does not ever directly connect to Highway 28.
• Vikings: Where to start...
  • Kattegat is in Norway, but can somehow be reached from Hedeby in southern Denmark or northern Germany on horseback with no mention of a sea journey.
  • Kattegat is a real place, but the real-life Kattegat is the ocean strait between Jylland (the Danish peninsula) and the west coast of Sweden.
  • Uppsala is depicted as in the mountains, rather than in the middle of the lightly wooded plain it is in in real life.
  • Both the area around Uppsala and what is today south-western Sweden are portrayed as inhospitable wastelands, when, in real life, these areas are two of the most fertile agricultural areas in Scandinavia, and would definitely have been so in Viking times.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In George P. Hanley's fantasy about being U.S. President in "I Dream of Genie", the Capitol Building can be seen out the window of the Oval Office. This is not the case in reality. It also appears to be much closer to the White House than it actually is.
• Arrowverse:
  • Central City is located in Missouri and is 600 miles away from Star City. Yet Star City is located on the West Coast of the United States,^note The franchise gives conflicting evidence as to where Star City is located. It's usually construed to be in the Seattle metropolitan area. However, one map suggests that it is in the San Francisco Bay Area. which is over 1000 miles away from Missouri no matter how you look at it. Central City also repeats the Smallville mistake by having a prominent waterfront, betraying its filming location (Vancouver, like the rest of the Arrowverse).
  • In Batwoman (2019), Gotham is revealed to border Blüdhaven, which in Arrow is close enough to Star City to have a direct train line with it. This suggests that Gotham is located in the Western United States. However, in-universe maps show that Gotham is essentially in the same spot as Chicago (as opposed to its usual location of New Jersey).
• Stargate SG-1 places the Russian city of Magnitogorsk somewhere in the vicinity of Magadan, over 3000 miles away.
• Lucifer (2016) is set in Los Angeles. In one season three episode, Dan goes to Hawaii on vacation. He has three layovers on this trip, due to his "airline miles." LAX is one of the primary hub airports to Hawaii, no matter how cheap Dan's mileage program is he should have had no trouble booking a direct flight. He ends up on a layover in Vancouver, British Columbia. Somehow.
• Home Improvement:
  • The show itself is set in Detroit, which in the series is depicted as astoundingly white, nothing like real life. There are, however, hints and mentions that it actually takes place in the suburb of Royal Oak.
    • Royal Oak is confirmed by a closeup of Brad Taylor's driver's license in the scene transition from The Teaser in the season 6 episode "Workin' Man Blues," where it is also revealed that the Taylor family's address is 510 Glenview Road. There is a street named Glenview in Royal Oak, but it is an Avenue, and its addresses only go as low as the 2200 range (the 500 range is at Park Avenue or Pingree Boulevard heading north from the baseline at 11 Mile Road and at 5th Street heading south, and Glenview Avenue intersects neither).
  • And even then, it's extremely obvious that it was filmed in Los Angeles, as noted by distant mountains in multiple outdoor shots, as well as occasional appearances of California architectural styles that were nonexistent in Michigan.
  • In an episode where Tim invites one of Jill's former coworkers to her birthday, and finds out later that the two weren't exactly friends anymore, but the coworker still calls up to get directions to the house, Tim intentionally sends her "on 94 west" to "10, and go 12 exits", as doing so would make her end up in Canada. Getting from the I-94/M-10 interchange in Detroit to the Canadian border only involves passing seven exits along southbound M-10 before the freeway ends at a traffic light at Jefferson Avenue and Griswold Street, and then from there, passing two additional traffic lights, making a right turn at the second, does indeed take you into Canada (via the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel).
• The Wire: In season 2, the prostitutes who were being trafficked are shown with Republic of Russia passports. There is no such thing as a "Republic of Russia". There's the Russian Federation, which is divided into a multitude of subjects, some of which are republics and some of which aren't.
• Agatha Raisin: Carsley is meant to be somewhere in Gloucestershire, presumably in the north east of the county somewhere by either by Bourton on the Water or Morton in the Marsh. Somehow, the local police are based in Evesham, which is not only in a different county to the north of Gloucestershire in real life, but it is also covered by a completely different police force, the local bus company is from an area south of Gloucestershire, and Bath is apparently only a half an hour drive away, when in reality it is over an hour away.
• Once Upon a Time: Multiple establishing shots of Hyperion Heights show the Seattle Monorail running through the neighborhood. Based on its proximity to the famous Fremont Troll, Hyperion Heights is located just off the Aurora Bridge. The Seattle Monorail doesn't run through that part of the city.
• Round the Twist: In "Wunderpants", after Mr. Gribble fails to impress some Japanese developers, they can be seen taking a plane (and not a private one) not even half an hour later. However, the show takes place in a town that is known to be located somewhere on Victoria's Great Ocean Road; at its closest, Melbourne airport is two hours away.
• World on Fire: A rather jaw-dropping instance of this between episodes 1.04 and 1.05. Gregorz and Konrad somehow manage to get from Poland to Belgium on foot, which would mean that they either managed to traverse the entirety of an extremely hostile and alert Germany without being caught, or somehow gained the ability to teleport.
• A season 10 episode of The Blacklist has a flashback in which an Mi6 agent refers to a Noodle Incident in Kolkata. He pronounces it that way and the Netflix subtitles spell it the same way. Kolkata was officially called Calcutta until 2001; prior to that, it was unusual for someone not from or living in India to use the Bengali pronunciation, so if anything a British government agent probably would have been even less likely to do so.