Top Chef Fort Worth. Season 10 of Bravo TV's Top Chef premieres November 7. Season 9 of Top Chef was Top Chef Texas.
If you parse the above paragraph you will see I am not actually indicating that Season 10 of Top Chef is going to be Top Chef Fort Worth.
Because it isn't.
Season 10 of Top Chef is going to be Top Chef Seattle.
That got me to thinking. Why is it that it is highly unlikely there would be a Top Chef Fort Worth?
Why are there no TV shows which use Fort Worth as their setting?
I can think of several TV shows that use or have used Seattle as their setting. Frasier, Grey's Anatomy, Real World. Others that I'm forgetting.
Okay, I just now Googled "TV Shows Seattle" to find there is a Wikipedia article titled List of television shows set in Seattle. It is a long list. It starts with Here Come the Brides. On the list are A Year in the Life, The Night Strangler, John Doe and many more.
I Googled "TV Shows Fort Worth" to find no Wikipedia article listing television shows set in Fort Worth.
Methinks this is a very interesting question to seek an answer to.
What is the question?
Why is Fort Worth not used as the setting for any television show?
Me also thinks it would behoove the Fort Worth powers that be to ponder that question.
Methinks Fort Worth might be a good setting if a TV producer were looking for a city with a rather humdrum downtown, poorly maintained parks, with a closed eyesore of a park at the heart of its downtown (Heritage Park), people walking beside roads without sidewalks, an unseemly amount of litter.
Unlandscaped, littered, weedy freeway exits to the town's only actual tourist attraction, that being the Fort Worth Stockyards.
A ditch-like dirty river on which litter is often seen floating.
Lots of litter everywhere.
A drive back in time, that my visitors from the Northwest always find fascinating, that being a drive east on Lancaster, Rosedale or Berry.
I actually think Fort Worth would be a great setting for a TV show and that Hollywood is actually missing out on a potential gem.
It would need to be a Twin Peaks/ Northern Exposure type show. Maybe a primetime soap opera.
Just look at the elements that clever writer's could have fun with.
Fort Worth has had a corrupt mayor named Moncrief who was so dumb he tried to dye the Trinity River purple as some sort of tribute to TCU being in the Rose Bowl.
Fort Worth's corrupt congresswoman, Kay Granger, had her unqualified son, J.D., installed to run a bizarre public works project, for which the public has not voted, called the Trinity River Vision Boondoogle, a project which abuses eminent domain to take down Trinity River levees that have kept Fort Worth dry for decades, to build a little pond, and a flood diversion channel that will likely look so ridiculous it will become a tourist attraction.
Additional TV show fodder can be found in the town's sad excuse for a newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which acts like a Soviet-style propaganda rag, touting enterprises, like a sporting goods store called Cabela's, claiming it would become the #1 tourist attraction in Texas, bringing in millions upon millions of visitors. And then not a peep from the Star-Telegram when Cabela's does not quite perform as propagandized, not only that, it is now not only not the only Cabela's in Texas, it is not even the only Cabela's in the D/FW Metroplex.
During the summer hundreds of Fort Worth natives get into the polluted river in Trinity River Vision Boondoggle Rockin' the River Happy Hour Inner Tube Floats.
There really is a lot of material here for a TV show.
Fort Worth is really proud of having the world's only twice daily cattle drive. Cowboys drive a small herd of longhorns up and down the main drag of the Stockyards, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. You don't see something like this anywhere else in America.
A TV show based in Fort Worth could do flashbacks, back to the days of Hell's Half Acre, with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You could flashback to the Spring Palace and it tragic end with the heroics of Al Haynes. You could flashback to Quanah Parker coming to town. Or earlier to when Quanah's mom and sister arrived in Fort Worth after being re-kidnapped.
Fort Worth has so much culture an entire area is devoted to Fort Worth's culture, called The Cultural District. Does any other town in the world have a Cultural District?
So much material.
Fort Worth is the biggest town in America that has no major league sports team. But, the town does have a minor league baseball team, the Cats, who play against little town's teams. This seems sort of unfair and unsportsmanlike to me.
Fort Worth is the world's guinea pig for urban shale drilling and its fracking, which leads to contaminated water and earthquakes, along with natural gas. Fort Worth has 1000s of natural gas holes in the ground, with the town being blessed with an ever growing network of underground piping carrying non-odorized natural gas.
Like I said, so much material. Hollywood really is missing out on a Mother Lode of material in this town.
I'm done now, for now....
5 comments:
Country Music Television has a series called Texas Women based in Fort Worth. The women have been shown at Woodhaven CC and the Texas Pacific lofts and other places around town. One woman got into a fight outside of a Stockyards bar.
Storage Wars Texas has visited Fort Worth.
Fast and Loud (based in Dallas) showed the Tarrant County courthouse from the North Main bridge, but for some reason it was captioned as being in Frisco.
Tim Love has probably done some shoots in Fort Worth for the Food Network. I'm speculating on this one.
Walker Texas Ranger filmed in Fort Worth, especially at and around the courthouse.
And then there's COPS.
Preparing a script now for the pilot of Top Curmudgeon: Fort Worth. Sure to make other cities green with envy! :)
Double Ugly and CatsPaw, I'm sure those were all Top 20 shows. I don't know how I could have missed ever seeing any of them.
And why is the current opiate of the masses-network "reality shows" so important for Fort Worth to be included? Celebrating bad behavior whether New Jersey or Texas is really puzzling. Why do you watch? Why the glee?
Anonymous, I did not realize it was important for Fort Worth to be included on network Reality Shows. I don't watch Glee. Where does Anonymous get the idea that bad behavior is celebrated on these shows, without Anonymous being a viewer? Is Anonymous making a judgement without first hand observation?
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