What is the most unrealistic depiction of the USA you've ever seen in movies or TV shows? Can be your town, state or the country as a whole
What is the most unrealistic depiction of the USA you've ever seen in movies or TV shows? Can be your town, state or the country as a whole
Maybe this isn’t a USA specific thing but for me it’s always how large peoples houses and apartments are on TV. Those places are huge. My family could never afford anything like that, and it often makes no sense if the character has a relatable job.
If it's addressed at all, its usually handwaved away as either:
- Friends Rent Control (Warning: TVTropes)
- Actually not as large as it seems on TV.
How I Met Your Mother did the latter pretty well. The whole show was a story the narrator was telling his kids, so it was all based off of how he remembered his life at the time. What we see on TV is just him remembering the NYC apartment bigger than it was.
Some of that is for shooting. Like on The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, Uncle Phil can definitely afford a house that big, but its layout is bizarre. The downstairs is dominated by a living room and kitchen in a sort of L shape that does not match any exterior shot and is a frankly mediocre use of space. It's because there's three cameras roving around where half the walls should be. And a live studio audience! They have to see and hear what's going on, or else it might as well be a laugh track.
Basically - it's a stage. It's not a set. You're watching a briskly-edited play, with an unusually high sense of verisimilitude. So yes, if you map out Jerry Seinfeld's apartment, it's deep and spacious and maybe doesn't connect to the hallway right. But that's just to give the actors somewhere to move. On-camera, it looks compressed, with very little of that floor space visible, and the back office simply left as a hand-wave for whatever you think is missing.
Yeah the poor students living in manhattan etc.
Whats insane is we used to. My janitor dad and homemaker mom afforded a five bedroom, three bathroom house with full basement, workshop, seperate dining room, living room, breakfast nook, kitchen. it was dillapitated sure but not to an unlivable level. Massive porch.
Judge Dread. Oh wait, you said UN-realistic didn't you!?:-) Then Idiocracy, where they actually put a smart person in charge.
Real answer: Hallmark shows, which are basically porn for conservative women. City dweller comes back home for a visit for the holidays, learns the meaning of Christmas or sth and then changes their life around to be identical to everyone else in the small town.
There's a lifetime movie called Snowed Inn Christmas where the whole premise is two big city journalists get stuck in Santa Claus, Indiana during the holidays. In the movie the town is a picture perfect Christmas village, but the real Santa Claus is basically fields in the middle of nowhere, plus the Holiday World theme park (which is a legitimate banger if anyone gets the chance to visit). It was filmed in Winnipeg. There are funny details like how their flight gets diverted to the "airport" in Santa Claus even though there isn't an airport that is not a grass strip for like 50 miles at least.
So, you're saying some kind of lunatic actually named a town "Santa Claus"? And nobody slapped him?
Where people in small towns are accepting of everybody even if you dress differently. If you’re new in town, they’re very welcoming to you. Most small towns that is not the case.
In the 90s show "Twin Peaks" the intro showed a sign saying "population 52,201", but in the show itself everyone in town knew each other and the town itself was the size of a small village, with one diner, a few cops, and no infrastructure apart from the logging industry. It would have been more realistic to have the sign say the population was in the hundreds or maybe 1000 at most.
Source: I grew up in a small town with a population of about 1100 people and it was several times larger than Twin Peaks in area, and even with that small number of people it was rare to bump into more than a couple of acquaintances in a week's time.
Twin peaks had the sign changed at the last minute. It was originally supposed to be about 5,200, hence the mismatch between the sign and the tone
The only thing "Pensacola" in this pic is the water and the helicopters.
There's a 10 or 12 story hotel, and that's the tallest structure down there.
That the US always fights for what is right
History is written by the victors.
Dropped a word in the title?
One unrealistic movie troupe is that the single mom always lives in the HUGH house in a super nice area. Working a low paying job that could never afford said house.
Indeed, thanks
"movie"
How long it takes to get anywhere.
They manage to cross major cities in mins when the reality is 1-2 hours during regular traffic. Or they just fly somewhere else and are there a few hours later. You can't even get through airport security in the time it took them to drive there, fly and then drive to the next location.
There was an episode of X-Files that dealt with the Jersey Devil. At one point it shows they are at "the outskirts of Atlantic city" and show it as the Pine Barrens.
That's not the outskirts of Atlantic city. The outskirts? You mean the ocean? You mean the Black Horse Pike?? You mean fucking Ventnor???? Pine Barrens are further inland!
That poor people live here. According to Zillow, the average price for a home is $760,877. For fuck sake, Travis Barker of Blink-182 used to live here.
There was a thread going around on Bluesky a while back about how the reason we had so many good Grunge bands in the 80's/90's is because it was entirely possible to make a living off of a part-time income back then. Thirty years ago the dirtbag lifestyle was as feasible as supporting two families on one full-time income. Then rents skyrocketed with the advent of Realpage price fixing, minimum wage stagnated, jobs dried up or cut back, and suddenly everyone's focused on surviving shit life syndrome. Is it any wonder the only artists these days who can survive long enough to get popular are the ones who already have means?
Leave It to Beaver
Team America: World Police depicts the main characters as both nationalistic and kinky. Nationalists are vanilla.
You say that, but right now at this moment there’s undoubtedly at least one Republican state rep getting his dick sucked through a hole in an airport bathroom stall.
They aren't vanilla, they're repressed. And it's part of why they are such freaks publicly.
