Imagine if British television worked like Canadian television and shows like Sherlock couldn’t be explicitly set in London, but had to be set in some ultra-generic city that could be anywhere in Europe.
wait what? whats up in canadian tv??
Canada doesn’t have a very large population, so producers can make more money if they try to shoot for an international (i.e., American) audience. Unfortunately, recieved wisdom has it that American audiences would never care about any stories that aren’t set in America (or at least a plausible approximation thereof), so there’s an entire genre of Canadian-made TV series shot in places like Toronto and Vancouver where they never state the name of the city, edit out any identifiable landmarks, flags, or currency, and have all of the Canadian actors talk in generically North American-sounding accents using words like “restroom” and “miles” so that viewers could easily imagine that it was Chicago or LA. Sometimes they actually just explicitly set it in America. Famous examples of this in action include Orphan Black.
something like 70% of all the shows i watch are filmed in vancouver or toronto but only two of them are actually set in canada, wynonna earp and private eyes
on the flipside leverage was filmed here in portland but set in boston, while backstrom was set in portland but filmed in vancouver. and brooklyn 99 is filmed in la, so it's a whole industry thing.
