Hollywood on the Hudson

Increasingly, New York City is turning into one giant movie and TV set. According to this article, there are now 23 prime time TV series being filmed in our fair city. Can you believe that? I didn't even there were 23 scripted shows left on prime time TV!

And here's where it gets weird: you'd think that all the shows and movies being shot here are set in NYC. But they're not! The Good Wife shoots here but is set in Chicago. The Oscar-winning Scorsese movie The Departed was mostly filmed here but was set in Boston. And believe this if you can but the mini-series of Mildred Pierce was shot here and New York was made to substitute for Los Angeles. Haha! Take that LA!

Increasingly, shows like Friends and Seinfeld that were set in NYC but shot in LA are a thing of the past. And that's a great thing too because nothing drove me more crazy than seeing movies and TV shows set in NYC but that looked and felt nothing like the real city. There's a great and very weird show on FX called Louie about the moron comic Louie CK that's set in NYC and it is the most realistic, NYC-feeling show I've seen since Law and Order. 

While it's great that so many productions are set here, the only problem is that they're taking up a lot of space in a city that has little to spare. Streets and sidewalks get blocked off and people are inconvenienced. But if, in these hard times, its pushing cash into the economy than we can't complain.