Home: Sure, it’s where you hang your hat, but we don’t always get to make that choice, especially when we’re young. Your hometown can make as deep an impression on you as your family, and there’s a good chance you’ll feel that for the rest of your life, wherever it might take you. And that’s why it’s almost always a thrill to see your hometown on-screen or hear it mentioned in a song. Even if it depicts it poorly, or in a fundamentally incorrect way, if something is set in our hometown, we’re more likely to seek it out. And so Games Editor Garrett Martin asks: What’s your favorite piece of pop culture about your hometown?
As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].
In The Bedroom
For a long time, I thought the only piece of media to take place in my hometown was a brief scene in Stephen King’s Thinner, and the stand-in location used in the film doesn’t look anything like the real Old Orchard Beach, Maine. But then, post-Tár obsession, I discovered that Todd Field’s directorial debut not only partially takes place in OOB (as the locals call it) but was actually filmed there. In Field’s tale of heartbreak and revenge, Old Orchard is where someone can find a job as a bartender even after (probably purposely) shooting someone to death and… there is an element of that in the real place, to be sure. There were plenty of seedy local characters; our town fire chief was eventually convicted of being—no joke—an arsonist. It’s also a place I love very much. OOB is a seasonal beach town, a budget alternative to other coastal Maine hotspots like Kennebunkport and Ogunquit and a town that shrinks right up in the winter. Field is also a Maine local these days, so I believe he knew what he was doing when he picked the spot, even if he picked it 25 years ago. [Drew Gillis]
Lucas
I haven’t watched Lucas in forever, but as a kid, I always got a thrill seeing the town I lived in—the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn—in an honest-to-god movie, even if that movie wasn’t particularly good. (The Glen, the movie theater featured in the film—one where I snuck in to see Speed with my friends back in grade school and caught One Battle After Another only a few months ago—just wrapped up its run of 40th-anniversary screenings of Lucas this week.) But there’s so much I still remember: The titular 14-year-old bug enthusiast (Corey Haim) spying on a pretty new girl (played by Kerri Green, fresh off The Goonies) on the tennis court near Lake Ellyn, the hallways of Glenbard West High School, some character biking past suburban lawns to the tune of Dire Straits’ sunny “Walk Of Life,” and wondering why Lucas even bothered with that aforementioned cheerleader when the nerdy classmate who clearly liked him (portrayed by a pre-Beetlejuice Winona Ryder) was right there. [Tim Lowery]
Florida Girls
Laura Chinn’s TV show Florida Girls made me feel homesick for the weirdest things: the humidity, the boredom, even the mall where I used to work. It followed four young women down and out in the Tampa Bay area when one of them decides to aim for higher goals and get her GED. Their misadventures were unlike the tourist ads that sold Central Florida as a vacation paradise. Instead, it bottled the experience of the Florida I knew—of working families, questions about the future, and that languid feeling of being so oppressed by the heat and humidity you NEED to do something to cool off but you’re too broke for the water park, your friend with a pool is out of town, and it’s too far to go to the beach. It pointed out wealth disparities in our swampy neighborhoods, wrestled with the pressure of getting an education when the people around you don’t advocate for it, and told oddly specific jokes about local fixtures like the International Plaza Cheesecake Factory where football players from the Buccaneers could be seen among the graduation dinners and birthday parties. Just a few years later, Florida Girls is a time capsule of a bygone Tampa, which has seen rapid change in the years following COVID, and a product of another era in TV history where wonderfully idiosyncratic shows could blossom. Unfairly cancelled in its crib by the collapse of Pop’s original programming, we have at least one solid season of Florida Girls available to stream on Tubi to keep us warm until the next hurricane party. [Monica Castillo]
Bowling For Soup, “Ohio (Come Back to Texas)”
My formative years were spent in one of the many small, cookie-cutter suburbs that sprung up around Dallas after Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport made the metroplex boom. Among the downsides to this in the context of the question is that, because there are so many suburbs in DFW’s orbit, there’s very little pop culture specifically about any one of them—and the pop culture that is about one, like King Of The Hill‘s Arlen standing in for Arlington, feels a bit like stolen valor for all the others. That’s why Bowling For Soup’s “Ohio (Come Back To Texas)” works for me so well: It’s about generally Texan things, but it also namedrops my old county. I personally hold nothing against Ohio, but when a song takes pains to list out points of local pride (if you haven’t had Blue Bell Creameries’ Moo-llennium Crunch, you haven’t lived), it’s hard not to say, yeah, fuck that place and go back to Denton County! [Jacob Oller]
A Christmas Story
There has never, as far as I know, been a movie actually set in my hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. (Although Steve Martin famously—to Hautians, who never forget a grudge—dragged the city in a Playboy interview in the ’70s, and did take the time to literally wipe us off the map in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.) So I’ll go off of vibes: No Indiana-based project better captures the small-town feel of the region better than 1983’s A Christmas Story. Author/narrator Jean Shepherd may have been a Northwest Indiana boy, but Bob Clark’s film perfectly captures the vibe of the various mini-cities I spent my childhood being schlepped around for family visits: A bit dreary, a bit run-down, and so resolutely flat that the merest dusting of snow would turn the world into a dingy gray sheet. And, hey, at least it’s more respectful than that time Will Ferrell came to town to film hyper-local commercials for Old Milwaukee beer.Don’t block traffic in the middle of 7th and Wabash, Ferrell; that’s the goddanged Crossroads Of America! [William Hughes]
The Adventures of Pete & Pete
Growing up, it felt like New Jersey was at the center of the pop-culture universe. Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse depicted the interconnectedness of the densely populated Garden State. The Sopranos had all the macho posturing of wannabe gangsters found from Essex County to the Jersey Shore. But none of it was about Cranford, NJ, the idyllic small town where I was raised. Cranford was regularly used for film shoots—even the mid-’00s breaking point of New Jersey cinema, Garden State, was filmed here—but there is only one pop-culture Cranford, and it’s on Pete & Pete. In its third season, the show’s production moved from the town of South Orange to Cranford and became an instant cornerstone of Cranfordian lore. Namely, because every place you looked, there was home. The Wrigley household was a short bike ride away. The Wellsville public pool, terrorized by the Urinator, was where I spent my summer vacation. Iggy Pop played at my elementary school. People I knew were extras! Though Petes, Big and Little, faced the off-kilter menaces of Wellsville, to me, they were a reflection of the world I already lived in and spaces I already inhabited. To people in town, Pete & Pete was set in Cranford. [Matt Schimkowitz]
The Holdovers
While The Departed and Dunkin’ Donuts commercials have left the impression that everyone in the greater-Boston area has a thick Southie accent, is part of organized crime, or both, these cultural cliches miss the most defining elements of the New England experience: It’s cold, and everyone is pissed off all the time. Few movies tap into this energy as well as The Holdovers, a newly christened holiday classic about a shitheel teen (Dominic Sessa) and an insufferably pretentious boarding school teacher (Paul Giamatti) forced to break bread in late December while jousting with overripe vocabularies. The mentor-mentee/captor-captive bond between these two is the heart of the film, and it’s a delight to watch their icy Bay State exteriors slowly melt amidst borderline bar brawls and dislocated shoulders. Meanwhile, Eigil Bryld’s camera captures sleepy, period-accurate towns blanketed in snow, which will probably evoke a sense of déjà vu for locals even if you’ve never been to Shelburne Falls, where the movie was partially filmed—the fact that they never say where the story is specifically set just adds to the quintessential Massachusetts-ness of it all. Both in sight and spirit, Alexander Payne’s film gets at a sense of creeping cold, and how its only antidote is to seek out other prickly Massholes to begrudgingly share a fire with. [Elijah Gonzalez]
Designing Women
I can’t think of any pop culture set in the suburb I grew up in, so I’ll do what everyone Outside The Perimeter does and just call Atlanta my hometown. Atlanta was omnipresent on screens over the last 15 years, but it rarely played itself; it’s always London or New York or Madripoor, and never Atlanta. So despite its recent ubiquity the first on-screen Atlanta I think of is a decades-old TV show that was shot in Burbank: Designing Women. It could be as big and broad as you’d expect an ’80s sitcom to be, but as played by Dixie Carter, Delta Burke, Jean Smart, and Annie Potts, its central quartet of women had more nuance and real-world gravity than most sitcom characters. They each captured something recognizable about the South of the 1980s, from the class and (often vulgar) flash of Atlanta’s elite, to small town Southerners trying to make it in the big city. It dealt with serious issues with more tact and wisdom than you’d expect from “very special episodes,” with Meshach Taylor’s character setting up examinations of the South’s racial history and complicated social dynamics. Its four leads were pretty much the only women on TV in the ’80s who looked or sounded like the women—family, teachers, friends’ moms—in my life. At a time when most Southern characters on TV were either Hee-Haw clowns or hillbilly relics in ’60s reruns, Designing Women showed that behind the accents Southerners were real people, too—or, at least, sitcom people. [Garrett Martin]
Keep scrolling for more great stories.