Transcript: Wanted: A Hollywood Happy Ending

Rob Long praises the gift of counter-programming in hard times

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I lived for a time in the West Village, in Manhattan, and I noticed tour guides leading walking tours around the neighborhood, stopping at all of the historical landmarks, like where famous artists lived or poets died or the characters in the TV show Sex and the City bought their cupcakes.

I don't know how many tourists take excited selfies by the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank his last, but I do know that lots of them gather in tight little selfie groups, heads all pressed together, smiles frozen in place, someone always saying, through clenched smiling teeth — make sure it's on burst mode, portrait mode, burst mode, so we can pick the good ones — in front of Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker, or the building on the corner of Grove and Bedford that, they say anyway, was the building used in one of the establishing shots in the show Friends.

On the one hand, of course, it's just typical tourist stuff — people like seeing something in real life that they've seen on the screen — but it's also kind of a shopping trip. Both of those shows — Sex and the City and Friends — had a powerful wish-fulfillment component. I know a lot of people who watched those shows and thought, when I'm older I am going to live in Manhattan and have friendships like that and eat cupcakes and speak in very matter-of-fact ways about my romantic life. When in fact most of those people, those who moved to New York, anyway, don't have time to hang out in coffee shops and are too busy taking the A or the C to the Utica Avenue stop in Brooklyn — anything to avoid the G — to stop off for some $18 cupcakes.