The smog-spewing buses park along Manhattan’s narrow side streets and hordes of camera-toting tourists waddle out and snap photos of the familiar building facades they know so well from their favorite TV show. The expressions on their faces suggest a suppressed excitement as if they are hopeful that Carrie or Jerry or Chandler will somehow appear from behind the door and walk past them uttering a witty observation on life in the Big Apple. I see these tours ALL THE TIME, and while a part of me is filled with loathing that they a) exist b) cause horrible traffic in the streets and c) further our celebrity-obsession, I have to say each time I walk past, say John Lennon’s apartment on Bank Street, I feel a slight tremor of delight, wondering whether my favorite Beatle, nay my favorite artist of all time may have tread the very sidewalk where I am walking. And so it goes. We all have our own secret fantasies of living among our cultural heroes or seeing the places — real or fake — where they themselves live.
This piece in the Sydney morning Herald takes a brief, and somewhat thoughtful, or at least more historical, look at TV tourism, making note not just of familiar NYC-themed shows like Friends and Sex and the City, but of some rather more obscure ones like Neighbors (an Australian TV show with the worst theme music ever written), Blake’s 7 (a BBC space series) as well as Dr. Who. But perhaps the best advice the article offers is that instead of visiting places like the West Village apartment in Friends (the interior of which was never used in the show itself) you pay a visit to the Museum of Television and Radio, which offers an expansive look at the history of the medium that has so captivated (and some say diminished) modern society. At least there you can actually learn something interesting … and you don’t hold up traffic.