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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of great TV shows and movies set in London at least.

Its weird - I know about little american towns like Boulder, Colorado. I've never been there. But I know what it looks like because its featured - or at least mentioned - in plenty of movies and shows.

But the population of Boulder is just 100k. Australia has lots of way bigger cities - like Brisbane, Queensland (population 2.8 million) or Perth, WA (2.4 million) that are never depicted on screen. Even on Australian TV, I basically never see brissie or perth shown at all. I only know what they look like because I've visited.

But maybe that's normal in the english speaking world - at least outside the US. We've gotta raise our game and make more good content.

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Part of the problem is selling into America - as an American, I can recognize London (smog and Sherlock Holmes!), Paris (Eiffel Tower), Sydney (Seashell Opera House), and New Zealand (Middle Earth).

I can't recognize Brisbane (and visiting it would feel like visiting Bluey).

Producers are SCARED of using unrecognizable areas (and/or for live-action, just film near where everyone is located).

If it makes you feel better, the USA has tons of large cities - far north of 100k, north of 1 million (especially if considering urban areas), that rarely or ever get featured in TV or movies; and if they do, it's often older ones.

Which is sad, mind you. Every city should have its own feel (too many places now feel like suburbs of Los Angeles, even in Europe or Asia), its own beer, its own food, its own media and music.

I don’t think it’s just unrecognisable places, it’s non American culture. Australia has made a bunch of really good shows. But it’s often quite Australian. I think it’s hard to break through on a meaningful level.

>I can't recognize Brisbane

Eh, lumping the gold-coast in with Brisbane is easy enough. Tanned bodies, barrel waves, way more tourists than you expect... it's basically California except it faces east, not west.

Boulder's metro area is around 330k - not quite "small town". That 100k is people inside one of the local government boundaries of the area. The US Census considers 5k to be the upper limit of a small town.

Brisbane is often called a "big country town" by other Australians, and it's 2.8 million people, so don't take that phrase too strongly :)

That said, agreed with the GP - places like Boulder, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, or New Orleans are places that we know about through culture and are internationally recognised, while being much smaller than Australian cities. That's mostly a factor of a huge amount of English-speaking media being from the US.

Australia attempts to counter this through laws requiring a certain quota of Australian content in the media, but that hasn't really worked - and is one of the factors which spawned many Australian reality TV shows.

New Orleans is tiny by global scale and not very large even in the US. It is, however, culturally unique (there is nothing else even close) and strategically insanely important.

Plenty of towns and cities in the UK are also totally unique culturally.

I visited Edinburgh a couple years ago and was blown away by the city and its people. God, everyone I met was so funny and interesting. But it’s almost never depicted on tv, outside of the occasional BBC crime drama or something. And those usually don’t get much air time outside of the UK. Peaky blinders has done an amazing job telling some of the history of Birmingham. I want more of that! The world is just so big and interesting. Far bigger than Hollywood will ever bother to portray.

Do Americans know what stoke on Trent looks like? Or Derby? U.K. towns of similar size

You might have heard of Aberdeen I guess. But have you heard of Geelong in Australia?

> Do Americans know what stoke on Trent looks like

American here. Literally the only thing I know about Stoke on Trent is that Messi would struggle there during a cold rainy night.

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