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 People actually live out there? Who knew?
Boasting some of the most spectacular public restrooms, gas stations, and 24-hour Hardee's drive-thrus in the country, America's Midwest is conveniently located between where you are and where you are going.
—The Onion: Our Dumb World
''They've never drove through Indiana Where do you live? New York? Awesome. L.A.? Awesome. Kansas City? Uh... where is that, like, in Idaho or something?
That's Flyover Country — American slang for the states which trendy coast-dwellers only see from the window of an airplane. Containing roughly half the country's population (if you're using a narrower definition) but much more of its landmass, this region includes everything between Las Vegas and Chicago at a minimum — and is often extended to everything east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the Alleghenies (if not the Hudson River). Sparsely populated, largely rural, and lacking in mediagenic glamour, it rarely shows up in works which attempt to appear trendy or up-to-date. It gets much more play in political circles, however, as the quirks of the American electoral system make appeals to smaller states essential. When one talks about the "red state/blue state" divide in American politics, this is what is meant by "red state".
Setting a show or a novel here can be shorthand for social conservatism, small-town insularity, Fifties-style family values, or a generally unhip ambiance. However, it gets used at least as often to inspire nostalgia for Eagleland Flavor #1, a friendly down-home environment where all the women are strong, all the men are good-lookin' and all the children are above average. When used in media, it often overlaps with Everytown, America, Down On The Farm or the Deep South.
Needless to say, the truth is a little different. While the states of the central U.S. do skew more rural than urban, the cities therein are as cosmopolitan as any coastal town. There's plenty of culture and nightlife to be found in cities like Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cincinnati, the DFW Metroplex, or Cleveland, and they have a much lower cost of living than the coasts. And even some of the smaller towns, like Boulder, Colorado* and Ann Arbor, Michigan*, have their own quirks. There are very few states that don't have at least one significant metropolitan area.
Politically, the cities and their metro areas are also more liberal than the surrounding region. Many of them are (or were) industrial towns with a strong presence of labor unions and minorities, plus college students who stuck around after graduating or dropping out. In fact, people in the surrounding, rural areas who don't fit in with the arch-conservative lifestyle will tend to relocate to the nearest decent-sized city. These factors lead to interesting scenarios where you have Democratic islands within states that are Republican strongholds.
These nuances and many more tend to be lost on Hollywood. Shows based in one of the coasts will lovingly show details of the landmarks and locales (Sex and the City was known for using real-life bars and restaurants as the girls' hangouts), while Midwestern locations are either fictionalized or used as a generic backdrop. This is because Indianapolis might as well be Addis Ababa to those who write TV shows and movies.
The part about the boring landscape, however, is true for the Great Plains, which covers much of the region but not the whole thing. While the cities can be quite interesting, outside of the cities is mostly just hundreds of miles of corn, wheat, and soybeans, broken by the occasional vast and ungodly foul-smelling cattle feedlot. Things do change once you hit Indiana, however, as it and everything to the south and east have a fair deal of hills, ravines, and forest, providing slightly more to look at from the highway than cornfields.
More charitable definitions of the term refer to smaller areas of the country, but tend to imply that those areas which do qualify are nasty pieces of work. Like, Deliverance nasty. "Flyaround Country" might better capture the implications we're shooting for here.
The general concept also exists on a much smaller scale in the state of Pennsylvania, which itself straddles the line between the urban East Coast and rural Flyover Country. James Carville famously described the state as "Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in the middle", and the term "Pennsyltucky"Met the man who plowed that earth Planted that seed, busted his ass for you and me Or caught a harvest moon in Kansas They'd understand why God made those fly over states —Jason Aldean, "Fly Over States"
 is often jokingly used by residents to describe the state's mid-section. (Though recent studies seem to suggest that the differences have mostly evaporated in the last couple of decades.) Within neighboring New York, meanwhile, a similar dichotomy exists between New York City and the rest of the state.
See The Outback for the Australian equivalent.
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