4 Comedies That Were Completely Up Their Own Asses About New York and L.A.
Showbiz creatives mainly live either in Los Angeles or New York, so you’d think they would understand a little something about their own cities. But for some comedies set in America’s two biggest population centers, it’s as if aliens landed and created facsimiles based on the whispers of a rumor about a secret they once heard. Here are four comedies that were completely up their own asses when it came to depicting life in New York and Los Angeles…
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Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
All the cliches are here — the trigger-happy cops, the gay people, the traffic, the contrived movie sets. As L.A. Weekly pointed out, one character refers to Beverly Hills as “Bev Hills” — something no one has ever done before or since.
Come to think of it, the original Crocodile Dundee was just about as bad with its depiction of New York, full of pimps, muggers and “fuhgeddaboudit” cab drivers. As comedy sketches, those broad strokes might work, but it’s pretty clear that star Paul Hogan and his writing team never spent more than 45 minutes in either place before penning the scripts.
2 Broke Girls
@movie.meng
Just because you’ve heard them all before, we’ll spare you all the things that Friends got wrong about New York, including and especially the ludicrously large apartments and the missing people of color. Instead, how about the 2 Broke Girls and their funhouse mirror version of Williamsburg?
Their place of work, the Williamsburg Diner, is located in the “dangerous” neighborhood of the borough where “no one from the Upper East Side would ever go ever,” the street where “you can’t wear a fancy leather jacket” without it getting stolen. Complex notes that the bigger worry about the jacket “would be to avoid the mockery of better-dressed residents treading down Bedford Avenue from the Cheese Shop to the McCarren Park Dog Walk.”
Entourage
Perhaps the single most ludicrous element in the showbiz bro fantasy is the ease with which the Entourage gang moves from one part of Los Angeles to another. Reddit is full of people laughing about it:
- “They’d go from like Valencia to Ontario in under an episode, no frigging way.”
- “Hah, that was funny... the valley to Ari’s WeHo office in 15 minutes.”
- “I remember one episode where he traveled from Ontario Airport to the 118 Freeway in Northridge in, like, three minutes!”
- “And pulling up to an empty parking space.”
Sex and the City
Shades of Friends, once again. Viewers who actually live in New York boggle at Carrie Bradshaw’s insanely spacious, rent-controlled apartment on a tree-lined street on the Upper West Side. Video production crews need room to move around, but really? Sure, Sex and the City is fiction but this is practically science fiction.
Speaking of science fiction, in what world does a newspaper columnist for a third-tier newspaper end up with a splashy ad on a city bus? (One that drives down a nearly traffic-free street, by the way.) Even in the heyday of print journalism, this would have been a very odd sight indeed. Some weirdo defacing the ad with a crude phallus, however? Spot on.
