On Tuesday night, Fox's new sitcom Weird Loners premiered, and we just checked it out on Hulu. The show is set in Ridgewood, Queens, which is where everyone is moving, and the last stop for gentrification before we hit The Cemetery Belt. How did network television portray Ridgewood?
First of all, they built the block on a Hollywood lot, so it's already all too clean looking. The architecture of the brick townhouses looks fairly accurate...
However, the street itself looks more Village than anything. It's not often you see a Yellow Cab in Ridgewood.
Since the show is focused on “four single 30-something underdogs," and is a single-camera sitcom, you're not going to be cringing as characters ruin your favorite bar or hype up the neighborhood too much. This isn't like Girls, where a sense of realism is brought to the table. It's from the guy who made King of Queens, and he's made the interior of a Ridgewood apartment look like a suburban home...
The interior is not very realistic.
You will also see some city-centric impossibilities, just like in any classic fictional television show. For example, the Queens Ledger pointed out, "A Queens-native should know better than to have the characters in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park shortly after leaving the Ridgewood townhouse—it's not really accessible quickly by foot or subway and the surprise of one character at being followed to the park leads us to believe that they were not all packed into the same bus." And as Bushwick Daily noted, one character seemed to attempt walking from Manhattan to Ridgewood on the Queensboro Bridge.
Points for no one saying "Quooklyn," though.
