Site-specific television as urban renewal: Or,how Portland became Portlandia

The rise of site-specific TV

The dispersion of on-location film and television production is not a new phenomenon. In 1986, Storper and Christopherson published their highly influential work on the vertical integration of the film industry and the dispersion of film locations globally, where they identified four different types of filming locations: developed production centers, second-order centers, edge centers, and occasional sites. This typology was an effect of what they argued was a re-agglomeration of the film industry, resulting in regimes of ‘flexible specialization’ in which Los Angeles comprised the center of an industrial complex that utilized the world as its ‘backlot’ (Christopherson and Storper, 1986: 319). Since then, attracting the film and television industry has become big business, often bound up with urban redevelopment projects, with states competing for productions by offering generous tax-incentive packages. These packages are aimed at luring producers to particular cities in the hope that these industries will provide an economic boon to their city in terms of expenditures, film tourism, and promotional branding (Christopherson and Rightor, 2010). There has thus been a proliferation of what Michael Curtin refers to as ‘media capitals’, or new patterns of media flows that ‘emanate from particular cities that have become centers for the finance, production, and distribution of television programs’, well beyond the boundaries of Hollywood and New York (Curtin, 2004: 271–2).

Yet even smaller cities aim to attract media production as part of their own strategies of branding and aims to entrepreneurialize the post-industrial cultural economy. These cities occupy an increasingly ubiquitous element of the televisual landscape. From edge cities (i.e. in close proximity to Los Angeles) like San Diego, to more far-flung cities (like Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee in the US; and Brisbane, Australia; or Ystad, Sweden), smaller cities increasingly serve as regular filming destinations, particularly for television filming. Whereas the phenomenon of Hollywood productions being drawn into on-location filming through attractive tax-incentive programs is typically understood as runaway production, the contemporary moment is perhaps better characterized by what Myles McNutt refers to as ‘mobile production’ (McNutt, 2015). He argues that, in part driven by the competitive tax-incentive system, ‘television series are capable of being planted in an increasingly wide range of locations – not necessarily centered in Los Angeles – and capable of relocating should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so’ (McNutt, 2015: 61). This suggests that rather than Hollywood being the center of production, on-location production in an increasingly dispersed set of places is becoming the norm, rather than the exception.

These changes in the political economies of the production industry help to contribute to the rise of what I am calling ‘site-specific’ television series, where the dispersion of production also opens up the possibility for series to be narratively set in a wider range of locations. Numerous scholars have already addressed how dispersion can tend toward a valuation of placelessness in a particular locale, as it suits the needs of an increasingly mobile television industry, ready to set and re-set the series in any place and every place that can offer the best deal (Coe, 2000; Elmer and Gasher, 2005; Lukinbeal, 2012; Swann, 2001). However, few have addressed the rise of series that are instead very much dependent upon and emphasize place based ‘authenticity’ of the filming location. Importantly, site-specific series are not only filmed in but also centrally about these places, and they often feature unique and niche elements of the city’s ‘authentic’, ‘hip’, urban, creative culture. For example, the television series Nashville promises viewers an insider’s look into the city’s country music culture, filming on location largely in East Nashville to provide a more ‘behind the scenes’ look at the spaces and places in which country music is produced, performed, and consumed. Likewise, Treme promises viewers a street-level view of the music scene in post-Katrina New Orleans, eschewing the iconic sites of the city for off-the-beaten-path places even more than Nashville. This commitment to ‘authenticity’ is evident in the decision to title the series after the historically (at least prior to the airing of the series) untouristy, but creatively and culturally rich, Black neighborhood, Tremé. While these shows focus on creative culture in the form of music, Portlandia instead takes up Portland’s quirky, hipster, DIY, artisanal culture that is especially associated with the increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland.

Site-specific television such as these examples is a result of, on the one hand, the television industry’s efforts to cultivate niche markets, to evoke a sense of an ‘authentic’ experience with its viewers, and cut costs on production. On the other hand, site-specific television is also the result of cities’ efforts to diversify their economies by attracting film and television production through tax incentives and other forms of cultural policy. These partnerships between local film commissions and the television industry represent a kind of mutually beneficial branding effort, as well as a mechanism for cultivating creative industry as a form of post-industrial urban renewal (Christopherson and Rightor, 2010; Mathews, 2010; Morgan Parmett, 2014).

As I aim to demonstrate with the case of Portlandia, site-specific series, and their alignment with contemporary urban renewal and city branding schemes, produce distinct forms of on-location shooting practices that differ markedly from traditional television production. Typically, as Chris Lukinbeal argues, the television script generally influences on-location production practices in largely formulaic ways (Lukinbeal, 2012). This is because television series tend to be driven by more formulaic genre constrictions than film (e.g. a police procedural show will need to show the outside of a building that can stand in for police headquarters, etc.). Lukinbeal suggests, ‘although each production constitutes a unique taskscape, routinized practices produce formula fiction, where narratives are predictable, and their locational needs are as well, especially with television shows and television movies’ (Lukinbeal, 2012: 181). Where and how a particular show is filmed is therefore likely to be more driven by a set of standardized generic elements than it is to be driven by either the specificity of a particular script or by a particular place. In this sense, a city’s best asset is often its ability to be void of clearly defined cultural signifiers so that it can stand in for anyplace/everyplace, as has been the case for Vancouver, BC (Coe, 2000; Tinic, 2005) and New Orleans (Mayer and Goldman, 2010), or to have a set of iconic features that can be used as an establishing shot to create a backdrop sense of place (Lukinbeal, 2012). However, in site-specific television, city spaces become central to on-location shooting, not just as a backdrop or establishing shot, but as central pieces in the storyline that establish authenticity in often serendipitous ways. As such, shooting becomes a constitutive part of the daily life of the neighborhood. But this speaks to more than a mediatization of space, in which media imposes its mark on cities, or inscribes texts onto landscapes. The shooting locations in television series like Portlandia make it possible for the text to both draw from and contribute to that culture in more enmeshed and co-constitutive ways than are ordinarily seen in traditional forms of television production.

Thus, while much of the existing research on on-location shooting takes a political economic perspective to determine the influence of shooting on a particular place, this article is instead interested in the more practical ways on-location production reconstitutes urban space and spatiality. I am most interested in addressing how the production practices involved in filming play a material role in the everyday practice of space in the city and how those practices align with the broader strategic aims of city governments’ post-industrial and creative-cities planning efforts. This case study draws on a critical media industries approach, where, through interviews with producers and discursive analyses of Portlandia’s texts and intertexts, I aim to situate a macro-level analysis of the political economies of the television industry within a finer grained consideration of how media production works as a practical and everyday negotiation of place, culture, and power (Havens et al., 2009; Mayer et al., 2009).

In so doing, I draw on Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices to argue for how site-specific television production is a tactical, rather than strategic, production of space. Tactics, ‘do not obey the law of the place’, whereas strategies ‘seek to create places in conformity with abstract models … [and] are able to produce, tabulate, and impose [on] these spaces … whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces’ (de Certeau, 1984: 29–30). Media production is often understood as an institutionalized strategy (see, for example, Couldry, 2004), where, in de Certeau’s terms, it is driven by:

the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power … can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats can be managed. (de Certeau, 1984: 36)

Media production, and particularly its involvement in spatial production, is thus often analyzed as a standardized and formulaic grid imposed on a particular place that complies with the rigid system of film and television production.

Here, I challenge the contention that understands on-location production as strategic and industrial, as a component of a formulaic culture industry, and instead locate it within the realm of tactics. Tactics are the ‘art of the weak’ that ‘must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment’ (de Certeau, 1984: 37). Although Portlandia is firmly rooted in the powerful media industry – produced by Broadway Productions, which produces Saturday Night Live, and airing on the cable television station IFC (Independent Film Channel) – I argue that the production nevertheless aims to align itself with more tactical negotiations of place by embedding itself in the everyday practices of the neighborhoods in which it films. Yet such embeddedness is also bound up with the current discourse on creative cities and creative culture, which emphasizes a kind of urban regeneration from below. Urban planning, particularly when it is bound up with discourses of the creative city and the post-industrial ‘experience economy’, is therefore also increasingly becoming tactical. That is, city planners turn to orchestrating, and capitalizing on, the tactical encounters of the quotidian in order to transform city space and culture (Freestone and Gibson, 2006). Thus, rather than building major entertainment destinations in the downtown area – what John Hannigan has called ‘Fantasy City’ strategies – contemporary urban planners focus instead on ‘creative placemaking’ and the building of ‘authentic’ connections and the entrepreneurialization of neighborhood culture (Hannigan, 1998, 2007; Markusen and Gadwa, 2010).

Thus, whereas de Certeau discusses tactics as a form of resistance used by the weak to challenge the dominant structures and strategies of the oppressor, I am more skeptical of the move of site-specific television and urban planning to the realm of the tactical. As Manovich argues, de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies has been reversed, as ‘the logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies’ (Manovich, 2009: 324). Media companies are focused on flexibility and constant chance, designed for ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’ in order to get users to input as much information about their lives into these platforms as possible. In so doing, the ‘ephemeral, transient, unmappable, and invisible become permanent, mappable, and viewable’ (Manovich, 2009: 324). Manovich is most interested in the role of digital and user-generated media, but I suggest that Portlandia’s on-location shooting practices are similarly designed to maximize flexibility and chance, capitalizing on the formerly ephemeral and transient practices of the pedestrian and transforming them into entrepreneurial sites of capitalist production. In so doing, the series’ tactical practices of production align with more insidious urban renewal efforts and the more macro political economic aims of urban development.

Producing the creative city from below: embedding Portlandia in Portland

Portland has implemented numerous cultural policies, including tax incentives, in order to attract media production. These policies are bound up with efforts to revitalize and transform the formerly gritty, largely working-class, post-industrial city into an entrepreneurialized, creative city, one that capitalizes on the cultural dynamics of the city’s perceived artisan and DIY ethos, but in enterprising rather than politicized terms. Cultivating media production has been critical to these efforts. The city has seen a 24% rise in production since 2007 and is increasingly noted as a television production destination (Northwest Economic Research Center, 2012; Suddath, 2012). At the time of writing, Portland hosted four ongoing television series productions – Portlandia, Grimm (NBC, 2011), Significant Mother (CW, 2015–), and The Librarians (TNT, 2014–).

As numerous scholars have already noted, the economics of film and television production, especially tax incentives, often drives the site of shooting, despite the fact that these incentives rarely pay off and instead are more akin to a ‘Hollywood handout’ (Christopherson and Rightor, 2010; Mayer and Goldman, 2010). On the one hand, Portlandia is unique in that it was not solely the tax incentives that brought the show there. It was conceived by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen with Portland in mind (it started as a webseries, ThunderAnt), and its production company, Broadway Video, was committed to making every effort to ensure it was filmed in Portland (David Cress [producer], phone interview, 8 January 2016; Itzkoff, 2010). On the other hand, however, the state’s film commissioner lobbied the legislature heavily to ensure the series could be filmed in Portland for its economic and cultural benefits. Portlandia is bound up with Portland’s efforts to diversify its post-industrial creative economy, where the state’s tax incentives were put to work to attract television production and the creative class workers who are imagined to work in that industry (Northwest Economic Research Center, 2012). The commissioner’s lobbying for the series, therefore, put forth arguments that played a constitutive role in persuading the legislature that the tax incentives were a necessary and valuable way to diversify the state’s economy and, ultimately, helped to thrust Portland into a prime spot as a major television filming destination rather than a one-off site (David Cress, phone interview, 8 January 2016; Suddath, 2012). Portlandia, especially because it was not only filmed in but was also about Portland, was therefore a particularly significant case in demonstrating the potential benefits of the film and television industry for the city. Even though it is in some ways unique, Portlandia also constitutes a kind of exemplar par excellence for persuading legislatures about the potentiality of attracting the television industry. Importantly, the tax incentives paid out to producers do not equal the measurable dollars coming into the city through production (Suddath, 2012). However, cities, including Portland, continue to promote tax incentives for on-location production because of the immaterial benefits they are imagined to provide. This rationale especially undergirds Portlandia. Vince Porter, former executive director of the Governor’s Office of Film and Television, who lobbied the state legislature to ensure Portlandia could film in Portland, noted that Portlandia’s budget is smaller and doesn’t feed money into the local economy as larger productions (such as Grimm) are assumed to do. Under Porter’s logic, the value of Portlandia to the city is instead in the ways it promotes Portland as a lifestyle, both to outsiders, including those in the film and TV industry, and to residents:

There was definitely some hesitation the first year among some business people about having their stores on the show. But when everyone realized that Portlandia was garnering national and international attention, they decided it was good to have a sense of humor about themselves. The mayor of Portland even did an Emmy campaign for IFC called ‘Put an Emmy on It’ that included a map of some of the places that have appeared on the show. (Vince Porter, quoted in Suddath, 2012)

Porter’s comments demonstrate how residents and business owners are encouraged to see their daily practices and the quirks that make them specifically Portlandia-esque in terms of their enterprising possibilities. It is therefore not so much, or at least not only, the series’ representations of creative culture that the city is banking on, but also the more material ways in which Portlandia can embed itself in the rhythms of daily life in Portland.

Thus, in the case of Portlandia, the justification for tax incentives is based on the idea that the images of Portland on screen will help to further promote the city’s brand to tourists, investors, and entrepreneurs. It is also rooted in the idea that on-location television production can entrepreneurialize the city itself so as to further become this desired image on screen. Residents are not only invited to see themselves reflected on screen, but also to be those images through appearing, for example, as part of the numerous Portlandia tours that have popped up promising an insider’s view of Portland (e.g. ‘Portlandia’ Tour of Portland, n.d.; Secrets of Portlandia: Portland’s Free Walking Tour, n.d.). This is similar to the findings of Barker and colleagues, who argue, in their analysis of on-location filming on the Gold Coast in Australia, that ‘residents and tourists become actors in the performance of the city as an interactive exhibition space and exhibit … an emphasis on image-construction becomes deeply implicated in community and individual identity-construction’ (Barker et al., 2012: 110–11). On-location television production is therefore imagined by city developers and urban planners as a powerful urban regenerator, capable of not only rebranding and promoting the city to outsiders, but also through the solicitation of residents’ performances as well in a more tactical sense.

But Portlandia goes beyond embedding the script on the landscape. The script itself is also inscribed by this landscape in ways that are distinct from traditional television series, even those filmed on-location. Because the series is not just set in Portland but is also directly about the struggle over Portland’s identity and, indeed, the locales that could and should serve as the city’s iconography, the series produces a unique set of production practices that intervene into and appropriate these locales in distinct ways. This is perhaps best understood through what series producer David Cress (phone interview, 8 January 2016) described as a ‘cultural shift’ in how Portlandia aims to film. He suggested that Portlandia does not film like a traditional television series, but instead aims to maximize flexibility and adaptability, moving through multiple locations each day with minimal gear. Cress stressed especially that everyone involved in the shoot must be prepared to spend ‘less time moving and more time shooting’. Eschewing the use of the big trucks traditionally associated with on-location filming in order to minimize moving time, the crew must know the city at an intimate level in order to get themselves where they need to be to keep up with the pace of shooting. They must make themselves a part of the neighborhoods that Portlandia films (primarily North and Northeast Portland) by becoming familiar with and embedding themselves in the neighborhood streets, routines, and locations. This is distinct from how TV series are normally shot, where the needs of production drive where and how they can shoot. Portlandia instead aims ultimately to be flexible, to make the place drive the shoot locations and timing as much as the script does (albeit within limits).

This ‘cultural shift’ also enables the production to draw on the living labor (Read, 2003) of local Portlanders. Locals are invited to participate on set by working as extras, where they can perform their everyday lives on screen. Sometimes, as David Cress noted (phone interview, 8 January 2016), the process is less formal, where, for example, the quirky donut shop owner’ will be asked to play themselves. Similarly, Cress suggested that the shooting flexibility enables them to draw on locals as ‘coaches’, who give insight into what an ‘ordinary Portlander’ might do in a given situation. These practices saturate daily practice and routine with the potentiality of mediatization which, in turn, encourages citizens to view their daily experiences as potential Portlandia sketches. Though the series’ representations clearly do some of this work, it would be remiss to overlook how its production practices perform this work as well. Where Portlandia films, who it films, how it films, and the intermingling of the crew in the neighborhood work in site-specific ways to produce the creative, enterprising city through the orchestration of the culture, lifestyle, and daily practices of residents.

Contemporary practices of on-location television therefore work by embedding filmmaking into the daily practices and rhythms of neighborhood culture, a technique that depends precisely on the particular dynamics at play in cities not traditionally known as production centers. As David Cress (phone interview, 8 January 2016) claimed, filming in Portland made Portlandia’s ‘cultural shift’ in production practices possible, since in the big production centers (e.g. Hollywood, New York, Vancouver), there is a ‘more rigid type of filmmaking’, in part due to a heavy union presence. In a ‘regional marketplace’, he argued, the crafts are not so rigid because the crew often works on multiple types of production in order to cobble together work throughout the year. The shooting duration for Portlandia is fairly short (only about 2.5 months), so the crew must have other work lined up for the remainder of the year. The crew themselves, then, are engaged in the ‘gig economy’ (Horowitz, 2011) of precarious labor that is central to the post-industrial, creative economy. But more importantly for my purposes here, this flexibility of labor also enables more flexibility in shooting. Craftspeople can work on multiple elements of the production as well as draw on their knowledge of the city gained through their other work. Portlandia’s practices of shooting all depend upon the crew’s more tactical approach to on-location shooting, which Cress suggested pays off as a ‘wonderful alignment’ by making the show more ‘compelling’.

In using the term ‘tactical’, I aim to center de Certeau’s meaning of the term, where, as described above, he discusses how a pedestrian tactically navigates city streets in ways that can go against, resist, and defy the more strategic urban plan of the city. Similarly, Portlandia producers seem to aim to have the production navigate the city at the level of the street, the pedestrian, defying the limits of more traditional strategies of television production that limit what makes it on screen and how it is represented there. But simultaneously, these practices work to entrepreneurialize city space, eschewing the more strategic framing of place in terms of city icons in favor of the more everyday, off-the-beaten-path spaces of the lived neighborhood. Thus, whereas ordinarily television filming sites are set by iconic signifiers, Portlandia is working to transform the mundane into alternative signifiers of the city. For example, even as the opening sequence portrays some central locales that clearly identify the city as ‘Portland’ (such as the ‘Portlandia’ sculpture by Raymond Kaskey that stands above the entrance of the Portland Building), the sketches primarily center around more mundane and less known locales, such as the feminist bookstore In Other Words. In so doing, the series is bound up with a struggle over what constitutes an iconic signifier in the first place, entrepreneurializing more everyday areas of Portland by constituting them as newly iconic through their appearance in the series.

On-location shooting therefore works as a tactical practice that helps to transform artisans’ and DIY creative practices into entrepreneurial ventures that perform the work of urban regeneration as a form of what I call ‘TV renewal’. I use the term to specifically argue that the work of Portlandia, and other site-specific television series, is a particular form of urban renewal. The synergies between Portlandia’s tactical practices of on-location filming and creative entrepreneurialism highlight the ways in which the broader strategic plans for constituting a creative city draw on the embodied, daily practices, and living labor of Portlanders in and through television production. In this sense, the living labor of Portlanders whose artisanal practices might otherwise work against the aims of capitalist governance – as much of it depends on a DIY and even barter-based economy that often carries implicit and sometimes explicit critiques of corporate capital – is subsumed into a rationale that revalues these practices as economically viable and their subjects as potentially enterprising for the creative TV economy. It is here where the site-specificity of the locations in which Portlandia films becomes particularly significant. The series’ embeddedness in these neighborhood cultures positions the production to have a direct and material stake in struggles over these spaces. It is therefore to these more political stakes bound up with Portlandia’s on-location filming practices and its production of TV renewal to which I turn in the next section, where I discuss the debates over the series’ relationship to gentrification of the city.

The gentrifying effects of TV renewal in Portland

Portlandia films primarily in North and Northeast Portland, typically known as the hotbed of the city’s hipster and artisanal creative culture. These neighborhoods are also, historically, the city’s Black neighborhoods. Arguably, these neighborhoods have already been ‘renewed’, having undergone various phases of gentrification through real estate redlining, speculation, and urban renewal projects that destroyed whole blocks of Black businesses and spaces of Black cultural production (Gibson, 2007). However, the struggle over the intensifying gentrification in these neighborhoods continues as Black Portlanders work to resist contemporary urban renewal schemes (Semuels, 2016).

The increasing association of North and Northeast Portland with the kind of hipster artisanal culture on display in Portlandia is at the very center of efforts to resist gentrification. These efforts of resistance came to a head when the feminist bookstore, In Other Words, refused to allow Portlandia to film future seasons in the store and put up a ‘Fuck Portlandia’ sign in their window. The bookstore served as a filming location for one of Portlandia’s most popular sketches, where Fred and Carrie embody two radical feminist owners of the fictionalized bookstore ‘Women and Women First’, modeled after In Other Words. According to the store’s owners:

In Other Words is in the heart of a historically Black neighborhood in Northeast Portland. We have Black Lives Matter written on our window. Black Lives Matter Portland meets regularly in our space. But as more and more Black folks and people of color have become involved at In Other Words, Portlandia has only gotten steadfastly more white.… Portlandia is fueling mass displacement in Portland. Fred and Carrie are on billboards and realtors have gleefully begun using Portlandia’s popularity and insipid humor (‘put a bird on it!’) to make displacing the communities that made Portland a great place in the first place something twee and whimsical for the incoming technocrat hordes. (In Other Words Staff, 2016)

While there has been much discussion over the ways in which Portlandia’s representations of Portland are complicit in the gentrification of the city (i.e. in the post’s reference to the popular sketch ‘put a bird on it!’), there has been relatively little discussion of how the series’ on-location production practices are bound up with gentrification as well. What I want to bring to attention here is that the ways in which Portlandia is involved in displacement is not just in how it represents creative, artisanal culture, or in how it fails to represent Blackness in Portland, though these are indeed important. But it is also necessary to acknowledge the more tactical ways in which Portlandia films on-location that positions the site-specific series to intervene in, appropriate, and participate in gentrifying forms of urban renewal as well.

Significantly, these displacements are directly tied to the cultural policies that drive filmmakers to these neighborhoods in the first place, as well as the kind of embedded and embedding filming practices that result from the series’ ‘cultural shift’ in filmmaking. This is evident in producer David Cress’s (phone interview, 8 January 2016) contention that Portlandia’s decision to film primarily in North and Northeast Portland was both financially and culturally/narratively driven. On the financial side, he argued ‘less affluent’ or ‘up-and-coming’ neighborhoods are cheaper to film in due to lower costs of permitting and parking. These lower prices are a result of cultural policies that shape these costs in order to drive production to these more marginal neighborhoods to stimulate growth and urban renewal. This is further reinforced by the cultural and narrative dimensions that drive these locations, based on the perception that they are the hotbeds of the artisanal, DIY, ‘quirky’ and distinctly Portland culture that the series aims to highlight. Portlandia’s industrial and cultural/narrative rationales for filming in these particular spaces, and the practices they engage in when they are there, are therefore deeply implicated in struggles over urban development.

Ultimately, North and Northeast Portland continue to remain subject to new versions of urban renewal, where in the contemporary iteration they are figured as part of a creative, artisan economy. Portlandia seems to paint a rosy picture of these neighborhoods, similar to that of urban studies scholar, Charles Heying. In his book on Portland’s ‘artisanal economy’, Heying suggests there is a ‘burgeoning artisan economy that lives happily alongside an older Portland of working class businesses and regular neighborhoods’ (Heying, 2010: 52). Similarly, Portlandia’s representations of North and Northeast Portland as hotbeds of an artisanal and creative economy are absent of the more contentious politics alluded to in the blog post written by the owners of In Other Words. Perhaps even more concerning, for both Heying and Portlandia, it appears as though the cultural production of people of color within Portland does not count as part of the artisanal economy. References to the cultural practices of people of color do not appear a single time in Heying’s book, and Black and Brown bodies engaged in the artisanal economy featured in Portlandia are also notably absent. This is particularly problematic given that the spaces of productivity in both Heying’s book and in the filming locations in Portlandia that feature this artisanal economy are located in North and Northeast Portland. Heying’s and Portlandia’s apparent dismissal of racial and class struggle in Portland, and its continued resonances in Portland’s artisan economy, is therefore indicative of the broader culture of whiteness that pervades Portlandia’s seemingly progressive and countercultural, satirical politics.

And this brings me around to the main contention of this article. Portlandia’s unique, though increasingly prevalent, ‘cultural shift’ in on-location production practices, what I have termed here ‘site-specific television, represents a complex intertwining between place, production, and text that are indicative of a new phase of urban regeneration – TV renewal. In the case study of Portlandia, TV renewal reveals itself as a method by which the creative practices involved with television production work tactically to embed creative entrepreneurialism within neighborhood culture. In so doing, the more tactical practices of on-location filming align with the broader strategic aims of city planners and government to transform neighborhoods into economically viable and enterprising spaces. But the case study of Portlandia also further shows how this creative entrepreneurialism embodied in the artisanal economy is intensely classed and racialized, as the kind of hip, urban, ‘authenticity’ so often featured on site-specific television and fetishized by creative cities’ discourses of urban renewal is deeply bound up with struggles over gentrification.

Conclusion

Although Portlandia does indeed, as its co-creator Carrie Brownstein (in Talbot, 2012) notes, speak to forces operating in many cities and not just Portland, so too Portlandia’s spatialized practices of production are also local and specific, as they are implicated in the lived and daily practices of people’s real-life struggles to claim a right to the city. Articulating site-specific television’s role in ‘TV renewal’ through the more everyday sense in which media production involves itself in the daily life of the city, therefore, throws into focus the particular ways in which television production plays a role in entrepreneurializing post-industrial cities. ‘TV renewal’ works not through rationalized work processes and the determining flow of capital, but, rather, through the complex interactions between lived, embodied, and daily practices of on-location production.

Portlandia, indeed, plays a unique role in constituting creative entrepreneurialism by capitalizing on Portland’s artisanal and creative culture in ways that intervene in the city’s specific histories of race, class, and struggles over urban space. But these forces are at play in on-location based television more broadly as well, albeit with site-specific implications tied to each city’s unique cultural history and politics. In Nashville, for example, the city may appear as a more peripheral character to some viewers than Portland for Portlandia. But those who are familiar with the ongoing struggles in the city over the gentrification of East Nashville (where the series primarily films), and the role of creative culture and the ‘hipsterification’ of the country music industry in that gentrification, will likely find the claim that TV is doing some of the work of urban renewal bears merit. This suggests that contending with production spaces embodied in site-specific television requires not so much a grand theory that explains the political economic and industrial motivations and effects of on-location filming. Rather, these new production spaces call for an approach attuned to the particular and practical ways in which contemporary television production practices shape, and are shaped by, the increasingly dispersed sites in which they film.