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Don't all the nuts roll down to Florida
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Funny how the swamps of Florida look just like the woods in Vancouver.
TV has an odd idea of what Florida is like. There's usually only two views: Bumpkins or Miami.
On the one hand, we've got Burn Notice moving in where Miami Vice and CSI Miami left off, depicting Florida as a tropical paradise, all sunny and packed with palm trees and beautiful tanned ladies in little bikinis. Because of Miami Ink, most of those now have tattoos. There's never bad weather unless it's convenient to the plot, there are no ugly people, and it might as well be California or Cuba or the Caribbean or any other sunny, tropical place. And it's probably loaded with ex-spies, drug dealers and murderers, skaters and rock stars and tattoo artists. Either that, or old-lady room-mates and daughters that have moved back in with widowed fathers.
Then on the other hand, we've got the idea that there's nothing here but bumpkins and hurricanes. The Pretender had a pretty good episode that was probably filmed entirely on a stage, where the only things that made it Florida were the occasional alligator and the fact that there was a hurricane stopping Jared from getting away from Ms Parker in time. The X-Files had three separate episodes set in Florida. One was filmed in Vancouver, which, by the way, looks nothing at all like a Florida swamp, nor does it look anything like the landscape around the Fountain of Youth, as the story says it should (The Fountain of Youth is here in NoFla, surrounded by a park full of peacocks, but I guess that wasn't creepy enough for X-Files). The other was filmed in California, but it hardly matters, because, again, they're trapped somewhere dangerous by a hurricane. The other one was only incidentally in Florida because this happens to be where Circus Folk retire, but it didn't matter anyway, because it was filmed in Canada and didn't impact the story at all. Not even a single orange tree. They're all full of weirdos, overly-southern cops that don't believe anything's wrong, and the occasional reference to bugs or gators. There's almost never any real sort of depiction of the weather or the climate or the environment.
The real Florida is probably somewhere between sun-drenched drug dealers and bumpkin-y alligators, but this is almost never portrayed on television. Even when there's a different take-- the previously mentioned involvement of Jacksonville in the core plot of Fringe-- we never actually see the city or it's surroundings. Florida is remote and compartmentalized by the media. We're only Miami, Orlando, Disney and swamps. People here are all weird, the land is interchangeable with anywhere else, and we're constantly beset by hurricanes that work perfectly in plot situations.
Come on, Hollywood! When does Florida get it's dues?
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