A town can appear on television without being allowed to remain itself. Streets become a substitute for another state, public subsidies sit beyond the camera's edge, and the workers most likely to be hired locally may be cleaning hotel rooms rather than building sets. UC San Diego ethnic studies professor Curtis Marez used four Emmy-nominated series to trace that dislocation between the place viewers see and the economy that produces it.
Marez discussed “Widow's Bay,” “Pluribus,” “DTF St. Louis” and “Beef” before the Sept. 14 awards. His analysis draws from “Producing Precarity,” his book about television work moving to lower-income parts of the United States. The central question is not whether a show is artistically successful or politically sympathetic. It is whether public incentives, employment and representation distribute the benefits promised when a production arrives. In “Widow's Bay,” Marez sees a fictional mayor's hunger for tourism and investment as a distorted mirror of real competition for film business. Local officials offer tax breaks, land or other support in hopes of jobs and attention. Marez argues that skilled production roles frequently travel with the company, leaving residents a narrower band of service work. That is an interpretation grounded in his scholarship; evaluating a particular incentive program still requires its own employment and tax records.
“Pluribus” raises a different absence. It joins “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” in using New Mexico while, in Marez's reading, giving little narrative presence to Indigenous people. Productions may seek permission, file paperwork and pay fees when filming on tribal land, so Indigenous nations are not materially remote from the work. Their near-erasure from the finished world makes land available as atmosphere while hiding the contemporary communities connected to it.
Georgia becomes an adaptable backdrop in his discussion of “DTF St. Louis,” which is set in Missouri. When a location can impersonate anywhere, its architecture and landscape retain visual value but its political conditions can disappear. Marez points to productions that avoid Confederate memorials while receiving support from a state government committed to preserving them. The omission is not neutral scenery; it can detach an image from the public choices that paid for its creation.
California supplies the final splice. “Beef” combines locations in Santa Barbara and Camarillo to create a seamless country-club setting. Marez notes the large difference in wealth between the communities and connects that blend to a story already concerned with status and class. The camera produces continuity where residents encounter separate housing markets, commutes and access to affluent spaces.
This way of watching does not require rejecting the shows. It asks viewers to hold content and production together. A progressive story can still rely on public money that might have gone to schools or health care. A beautifully photographed landscape can still omit the people with the deepest claim to it. An onscreen critique of inequality can be assembled through an offscreen labor structure that reproduces it.
For San Diego, whose film office promotes the region and helps productions with permits, locations and industry contacts, the questions are practical. Count local hires by job and wage, publish the value of incentives, identify what vendors keep after a crew leaves and ask whose neighborhoods are being made legible. A screen image is never the whole economy. Marez's point is to look for the workers, land and public money just beyond its edge.