Florida is a lovely place to call home, but it’s not without its discomforts. We are intimately familiar with swamp ass and sweaty underboob. We know the punch-in-the-face blast of humidity every time we leave the blissful comfort of an air-conditioned building. We smell the red tide. We step on the damnable sand spurs. We blow out our flip-flops by stepping on pop-tops.
Yet almost any fictional television show set in Florida conveniently glosses over the reality of living here. It’s probably why so many Northerners come. Maybe they get the impression that they’re moving to a tropical, Art Deco, 75-degrees-all-the-time paradise when they transplant to the Sunshine State, complete with dolphins that seek out their friendship.
On TV, we never see plus-size girls in short-shorts rockin’ cameltoes. No one is wearing slippers as shoes. And where is the parade of suspiciously thin, twitchy people walking along busy main roads? Or the metalheads and the good ol’ boys with confederate flag stickers on their trucks?
Speaking of rednecks, TV shows would have us believe that North Florida doesn’t even exist, as if it’s pretty much just Miami down here, with a dash of the Florida Keys or towns off I-95 thrown in — with the exception of Cougar Town, which was set in a fictional town in Sarasota County.
That show, plus Golden Girls, CSI: Miami, I Dream of Jeannie and the new Big Time in Hollywood, FL, weren’t even filmed in Florida. It’s almost like they don’t want beef-jerky-skinned banana-hammock wearing retirees showing up in their idealized versions of our Peninsula State. Whatevs.
At least Miami Vice, Dexter and Bloodline had the decency to film on location. Though the characters in those shows are miraculously immune to pit-stains (except for maybe Bloodline’s Kevin Rayburn, played by Norbert Leo Butz, who pulls off a pretty decent salty Florida native), the backdrops are convincing, because well, they are real, even if staged for production.
It’s also ironic that the most famous blazers worn in television history came from a show about characters that supposedly lived in the ass-sweat capital of the United States, where it’s just stupid to wear blazers. Even at night. But to balance it out, Crockett didn’t wear socks, so…
Also, no one uses koozies in outdoor drinking scenes, even when it’s supposed to be hot out. Pfft and an eye-roll. Every Floridan knows you don’t summer-drink without a koozie unless you like warm beer or watered-down cocktails, because even cocktail glasses can be koozied.
But TV land can have its fantasy Florida. Because we get the the real thing — natural cold springs, sexual predators and all. Besides, fall and winter are on their way, which really do make our months of irrepressible face-grease all worth it.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2015.