Counterfeit City

September brings us the beginning of another new TV season, and you all know how much I love my TV (both the set itself and the shows). A couple of new shows have already started, including Fringe on Fox. (Fox tends to start its fall shows ahead of the other networks, because their annual coverage of the baseball playoffs consumes a significant chunk of their prime time broadcasting in October.)

Fringe comes to us courtesy of J.J. Abrams, who has also given us Alias and Lost. (He seems to like those one-word titles.) Fringe is about an FBI agent who is called upon to investigate a mysterious occurrence at our own Logan Airport that may have a supernatural connection. Though Mr. Abrams would probably be reluctant to admit it, Fringe plays an awful lot like a certain other Fox show that premiered fifteen years ago, in which two FBI agents investigated mysterious occurrences with possible supernatural connections.

But I'm not looking to compare and contrast the two shows. This morning I followed a link from a Universal Hub story to a critique of the things that Fringe has gotten wrong about greater Boston. This is absolutely not intended to malign that writer's observations; I'm merely using it as a jumping-off point for my own thoughts.

I agree that some of these inaccuracies--referring to Back Bay as having its own police department, moving Stoughton to the coastline--are fairly egregious to us locals, but as someone astutely points out in the comments, it's entirely possible that the producers and writers are not making any particular effort to be locally accurate. This can happen either due to ignorance or deliberate intent. I'm inclined to extend benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. Any fictional universe, be it in a book, a movie, or a television show, is a creation of the imagination, and while many of these bear a strong resemblance to the places we live and work, we should not be too surprised when artistic license is taken.

A New Yorker might be appalled if a writer referred to a character driving north on Broadway, but I remember seeing Dennis Lehane speak several years ago, and someone asked him about a scene in one of his books in which a car drives on Washington Street downtown, but in the opposite direction from how traffic flows on it in real life. He basically shrugged it off, saying (paraphrased) "It's my story, so I can make the traffic go however I want." So when an agent on Fringe pursues a car "south on Fenway" after leaving a hospital and we all know there are no hospitals on the portion of the Fenway that goes south, we just have to let it slide. It's probably in there so the folks watching out in Missouri can go, "Oh yeah, Fenway, like the baseball park."

There have been hundreds (thousands?) of TV shows over the years that take place in one locale but are made in a different one. It's the nature of the business; location shooting is an expensive drain on the budget of a weekly television series. What helps them conjure an authentic sense of place is a nice batch of pretty, atmospheric establishing shots: aerial views, skyline shots, nighttime vistas of twinkling lights in buildings that we all recognize. This is where Fringe comes up short in its depiction and use of Boston; I don't believe that any of the exteriors or establishing shots they have used were filmed locally. I certainly haven't recognized anything.

Sure, they're shooting the show in Toronto or one of those cities that gets used as a stand-in for many other places. Fine, but not even a few authentic cityscapes? That's kind of lazy. Send a crew out here, shoot for a few days, add some CGI snow if necessary (the pilot took place during the winter, but who knows when it waa shot), then come back one or two more times to get some assorted shots in different seasons. Shows don't bother much with opening credit sequences anymore, but when done right, they can look great, and make our city look great as well. How about it, Fringe folks? Show us some local love.