dear producers and writers of Castle:

[chelseagirl]

I came for Nathan Fillion; I stayed for the characters. However, you're pushing me perilously close to going away forever.

I get that there's a long and honored tradition of television programs that are set in New York City but are filmed in LA. And while for certain types of programs, stock outdoor shots from the supposed location will work, but not for a detective show, where the characters have to be in actual crime scenes. So I don't mind that nothing on Castle has ever looked remotely like it's in NYC; that's the price of doing business. And yes, most of your audience either hasn't been to NYC or has only visited briefly and doesn't pick up on it. Fine.

However, how hard is it to get someone who's actually familiar with your supposed location to LOOK OVER THE SCRIPTS? A sniper can't post himself on the East or West sides of Central Park because they're filled with high end apartment buildings, so instead, he'll have to go to the SOUTH side. Have you *never heard* of Central Park South, home of many . . . high end apartment buildings? Oh, please. Central Park *North* would have served your purpose; the forces of gentrification are looming but they haven't entirely taken it over . . . yet, but no, why pay any attention to reality?

But when you had Beckett say that the bus was coming up the GRAND ARMY PLAZA entrance? There is, in fact, a Grand Army Plaza, but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH Central Park. It's just outside of PROSPECT PARK, which is in BROOKLYN, ferchrissakes. (And yes, it was designed by the same landscape architects, back in the nineteenth century, but I'm sure you couldn't be bothered looking that up, either.) ETA: two people have told me that in fact, there is a small Grand Army Plaza at Central Park, but they assured me that it is rarely ever actually referred to as that, and the one in Brooklyn is way better known.

Seriously, I know you're just a fluffy detective-with-romantic-tension show; we might argue it's an alt!universe (certainly my steampunk friends wish that club you showed in the steampunk episode really existed . . . ), but it's simply not that difficult to maintain a minimum of geographic accuracy, is it? *Seriously?* You can't even Google it?

Bored now,

Me

Comments

[silme.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. We don't have the new season yet, so I'm not looking forward to these errors.

We did get the new show with Dana Delaney last spring, the one set in Philadelphila, Body of Proof (also aired on the Alibi channel, Castle's home here). Now, I know I've not been in my native city for a few years, but watching the show told me I wasn't seeing Philadelphia, and I knew it couldn't have changed that much.

I was right. The first season was filmed in Providence, Rhode Island, and subsequent seasons are being shot in LA. Sheesh! Did they really think that Providence looks like Philly? I wonder how much the producers got in tax breaks from Rhode Island to shoot there.

As my friend Meg likes to say, the average IQ is 100. We're above it. There are a lot of people below it. I guess they assume most television watchers are that stupid or that eager to suspend their belief. :(

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

It's just frustrating how easy it would be to make it accurate, and it wouldn't really cause them any plot problems. And it's more respectful to the audience to assume that they might notice the difference, you know? It seems to be the standard for fanfic to *ask questions*, and have a betareader, and if appropriate, a Britpicker or its equivalent, and I'm not sure why professionals wouldn't hold themselves to the same standards.

I haven't seen Body of Proof, but if they were going to film it in Providence, why not set it in Providence, which has lots of interesting things of its own? One of the things I loved about Forever Knight was that Toronto was Toronto, not a stand-in for New York or wherever as it too often is, and you really got to see and appreciate . . . Toronto. When I visited, I recognized landmarks! I get why every show filmed in LA is not set in LA, because then there would be so many tv cops on the LAPD that they would be constantly tripping over each other, but . . .

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Here's one that's just as bad (or, in some ways, worse). I only heard about it long after the fact, because I would have flipped if I'd heard this while it was still "in process," so to speak, and could have been connected.

Many years ago an author wrote a romance for us that involved some character or characters taking a cab uptown on Fifth Avenue. (Yes, you read that right.) Her regular editor, who allowed her authors to get away with incredible fits of babyish behavior, was swamped with work. She asked another editor to handle the book. Other Editor corrected the reference and explained why. The author then called her official editor and threw a hissy fit - so the editor changed it back to Fifth Avenue! Yes, that's right. She intentionally reinserted an error rather than tell the author she couldn't have her whiny-assed way.

I still cringe when I think about it.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are kidding!

And that's one of the reasons why there are so many bad books out there; we *all* need to be edited, and edited properly.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Technically, that little square near the Plaza on 59th and 5th, where the horses and buggies linger, is (also) named Grand Army Plaza. But I only know that because I'm a big dork about New York trivia. I have never heard anyone call it that. It's like they have somebody looking at a map instead of talking to actual people. (I think if I had to identify it, I'd just say "the southeast corner of the Park.")

This is also a peeve of mine with Fringe, in which Vancouver is often called on to represent both Boston and New York. After three years here, my husband has fully begun to appreciate the extent to which there is no possible genericization of New York City, except maybe a residential block of brownstones. It's just too particular and too many people know it intimately. But my bigger peeve about Fringe is that their "Harvard" campus is all gray stone. Couldn't they have found some other place with a lot of red brick buildings to fake up the campus?

[ahab99.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yeah. The fact that they couldn't be bothered to get reasonably appropriate *stock footage* for the Harvard campus really bothers me, as it does for every show that screws that up (because it's a lot).

I really liked when they went to Dorchester and had a whole scene under the elevated subway tracks! ;)

[brightknightie.livejournal.com]

>"Couldn't they have found some other place with a lot of red brick buildings to fake up the campus?"

Yep. It's not too far from Vancouver to eastern Washington state, where Washington State University in Pullman is one of several actual college campuses with a core made almost entirely from red brick, and quite a lot of other banks, hospitals, etc. dating back more than a few decades are made of red brick, too. ~shrug~ Even the UW in Seattle has some red brick buildings, though not as many, percentage-wise.

(Yeah, I know, the filming tax breaks change when they cross the border...)

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

The exteriors were all established in Season 1, which was actually shot on the East Coast, where there are plenty of red brick buildings. I'm told that the "Harvard" locations were actually shot at Yale, which is kind of hilarious in its own way.

I'm an alum of UC Berkeley, which famously does not allow film crews on campus. The Berkeley campus scenes in The Graduate were all shot at USC, and give me giggle fits when I see that movie.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

OK, well there are two of you who identified it. But at least neither of you thought I was an idiot. ;-)

[fshk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was going to say—to be fair, the southeast corner of Central Park, that little square near the Plaza Hotel and the Apple Store, is called Grand Army Plaza. There's an equestrian statue of General Sherman there. But I would guess very few people know that, and that most people (myself included) think of the big arch at the northern end of Prospect Park when they hear "Grand Army Plaza."

I haven't seen much Castle past the first season, but I don't disagree that all shows set in New York should get a New Yorker to fact check the scripts. The first season of Heroes had some interesting ideas about what New York looked like, for example.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

As above, so two of you knew that, but at least neither of you thought I was an idiot. ;-)

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Ever since making a foolish error in a story, I've been sensitive to what is actually falsifiable. I'd say there's a distinction between an invention and an error--e.g., if "Castle" were to have a murder set at a fancy department store called "Seldon's" in order to be able to have free rein with sets and characters, that would be an invention, like the unfortunately nonexistent steampunk club.

Whereas the distance between 16th Street and 51st Street is fixed, so being able to go from one to the other in a car in 15 seconds is an error.

[brightknightie.livejournal.com]

>"being able to go from one to the other in a car in 15 seconds is an error"

Of course, TV makes that particular error everywhere, even when set at home in LA. :-) Numb3rs leaps to mind...

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

LA and distance is apparently one of those things that's hard to grasp, too. I remember taking a taxi at the last MLA (I was in the furthest-away hotel, because they promised smoking rooms for my husband, and then they'd gone all non-smoking by the time we got there), and the driver explaining it wasn't by distance, but by time -- and that at certain times of day, what was half an hour's walk might be more than half an hour's taxi ride.

But the script writers should obviously know better . . .

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

That's the thing -- in fandom, to get a betareader -- and experts in stuff we might not know about, like Britpickers, etc, are par for the course. So people with actual budgets can't manage likewise?

[executrix.livejournal.com]

"We don't have to care--we're the Phone Company!"

[mortalwombat731.livejournal.com]

They could pay an underemployed NYC graduate student or recent PhD... we're good at research, and we work for very little.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[ahab99.livejournal.com]

They make a lot of geography errors on Castle, unfortunately. But I've gotten so used to watching all the NY-based shows with a huge geography filter on, so it doesn't bother me that much. White Collar is the one that bothers me the most, since they've defined Neal as having a radius and then constantly do things that violate it, but....to date, it's not exactly the most pressing of disappointing things that show has done. :/

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

I was ignoring it, but that Central Park South thing was just that one thing too many . . .

[brightknightie.livejournal.com]

I remember anger and disappointment Marvel Comics when I was in middle school, because their X-books artists kept drawing Anchorage, Alaska as if it were New York City. The worst was when one -- Walter Simonson in X-Factor, if I recall correctly -- drew Anchorage's main, downtown, public library, the Loussac, with stone stairs and stone lions. Hahhahahahahah. The Loussac was then recently finished and the pride of the city, a beautiful modern, round building of black glass and steel, with sweeping ramps... and absolutely no stone lions. No Anchorage libraries had stone lions. Many of the branch libraries, in fact, were tucked inside mini-malls, occupying storefront spaces between laundromats and 7-11s.

Granted that there was no Internet for handy research then, I still found it annoying, because the artist was arrogantly not bothering to respect my city's uniqueness.

As a fanfic writer today, I often turn my desktop wallpaper to maps of nineteenth-century London or seventeenth-century Paris or thirteenth-century Europe for the duration of a given story. It is indeed silly that the writers of Castle don't use GoogleMaps, if they can't tack up a current map on the wall of their conference room.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

No Internet, but I'm guessing Marvel's offices weren't that far from that big library with the stone steps and the stone lions, which contains all *kinds* of information like, oh, what Anchorage looks like. ;-)

Or they could just hire someone who's lived in New York -- LA is full of them . . . but yeah, that's exactly it -- if we hold ourselves to certain standards, how annoying that the people who are being paid for this work don't do the same.

[brightknightie.livejournal.com]

I should have said that they kept drawing Anchorage like a shorter NYC. ;-) They did know that much...

>"if we hold ourselves to certain standards, how annoying that the people who are being paid for this work don't do the same."

Yep, especially such simple things! I'm on my third professionally-published, brand-new, hardcover, fantasy novel riddled with typos in a row.

[simonesa.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Castle long before I stopped watching it. I also came for Nathan, but he was not enough to hold me.

I do have a similar complaint about The Mentalist. I think that by the third season they can begin to splurge a bit on the sets. It is really suspending my disbelief when they keep returning to the same streets and houses over and over again. Mostly they don't even try to make them look different.