TV

New York City, the TV star

When “Naked City” debuted on television nearly 60 years ago, the show’s narrator made a point of telling the audience that this was no back lot production. As footage of pedestrians squeezing themselves between vehicles in Manhattan traffic played on the screen, he said, “This story was not photographed in the studio. Quite the contrary. The actors played out their roles in the streets and building of New York itself.”

“Naked City” more than lived up to its claim. The fabled police drama filmed in the South Bronx near Biograph Studios, where interiors for the series were produced, and in Greenwich Village and other neighborhoods of Manhattan. In a 1961 episode, a very young Robert Redford, who plays a killer, is seen with a bunch of fellow criminals unfurling a Nazi flag in a sooty alley behind an apartment building. A resident, sticking her head out of her kitchen window on one of the upper floors, spots them and tells them to get lost.

A line of people waits outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in hopes of seeing Sullivan’s show in 1968.Getty Images

The footage is grainy and the lighting poor, and yes, that is the well-groomed Redford, just a few years from movie stardom, but it still looks more authentic than anything shot on the dozen other cop shows that were set here but were actually shot on a back-lot in Los Angeles.

Once Hollywood reproduced New York on the streets of Warner Bros. and other studios, with facades that looked like the world we live in — tenements, brownstones, stoops, a courthouse — the real city mostly vanished from TV screens. For decades, series set in New York — “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Barney Miller,” “Mad About You,” “24” — and even “the Mindy Project” — either never set foot in the Big Apple, made infrequent visits with cast and crew or only used footage of the city in the credits (most notably “NYPD Blue” and its closing shot of an elevated train roaring down the tracks).

New York City received top billing with “Law & Order” in 1990. Like “Naked City,” the NBC war horse and its spinoffs fed viewers countless backdrops of the real thing. When the lawyers went to court, they were in Foley Square. When the detectives found a dead body or interviewed suspects, they were all over the place: uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side. Even Brooklyn. HBO’s “Sex and the City,” made the city glamorous, dipping into its clubs, boutiques and restaurants, and inspired the fantasies of countless young women who moved here to have the life lived by Carrie Bradshaw and company.

Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” was set in NBC’s Rockefeller Center offices and shooting spanned the city.NBC

Since then, thanks to shows such as “Person of Interest,” “Elementary,” “Girls” and “Law & Order: SVU,” it’s now possible to say that the New York we see on screen is the city we live in. And it’s impossible to imagine a show set in New York not being filmed here.

Tom Ross, location manager for “Law & Order: SVU,” says, “Everybody sort of says New York is the other character on the show, and has been for 15 years. You look at a show like ‘CSI: NY,’ which used to come to here for five days a year. It doesn’t look anything like New York.”

The Iowa-born Ross has worked on every iteration of the “Law & Order” franchise and has been everywhere from subway tunnels to penthouse office suites searching for choice spots. He believes audiences now expect a New York series to show its characters living in the Big Apple. “New York is such a magical place,” he says. “It’s the biggest city in the country. People want to come to here and see all the sights. They live through our shows when they see New York City.”

“Sex and the City” brought New York’s glamour to a new generation of transplants and made institutions of places like Magnolia Bakery.HBO

Finding new ways to showcase New York is one of Ross’ greatest challenges, though. “Law & Order: SVU” shoots 24 episodes a season and is on location four-to-five days in an eight-day shoot per episode. “On any given day, we’ll see one or two or even three, max, locations. That’s a couple hundred on a given season,” he says.

Even with the city’s thousands of streets and apartments, repetition is a problem. “There aren’t many locations that people haven’t seen,” Ross says. “We are now shooting in an are shooting in an office in the General Motors building. A really high-end law firm; they let us into their offices. The show’s never been there in all its seasons.”

Having already used thousands of locations in its 15 years on the air, “Law & Order: SVU” has had to go further afield for the right backdrop, including a remote beach house on Long Island Sound for its season opener and a functioning prison in Nassau County.

Much of Shaw and Reese’s covert heroism is based in New York. For all we know, Finch’s machine could be here, too.CBS

The series has been on so long that the city’s changing face — and its sharp decline in crime followed by gentrification — have forced Ross to find new places for crime scenes. The shiny glass condos now popping up in Harlem have pushed sent him north, into Washington Heights and east, to Maspeth, Queens, and less tony areas. “You can go to the South Bronx and find some good areas. As gentrified and hipster as Greenpoint has become, it still has some down-and-dirty areas. You can still find some pockets in Williamsburg,” he says.

It makes Ross miss the old days, the old New York.

“The Meatpacking District was full of prostitutes and transvestites walking the streets. Now it’s the Standard Hotel and boutiques. It’s lost its flavor,” Ross says. “I do miss the streets with the racks of cows hanging from the awnings.

“Red Hook was a great place to film,” Ross adds. “It was very gritty. That has changed. The spot where Ikea is used to be the New York shipyard. It had all these giant warehouse buildings and had so many great looks. All kinds of shows and movies filmed there.”

The “Girls” dance the night away in Greenpoint bar Matchless.HBO

No series has taken advantage of the new New York as much as HBO’s “Girls.” It’s so new that most of the series takes place in Brooklyn, where the series’ main character, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham), lives. The series shoots primarily in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the neighborhoods that most benefited from the exodus of young people from Manhattan and the development of the northern Brooklyn waterfront.

This season, the show has filmed in Matchless, a bar on Manhattan Avenue, for a scene showing Hannah’s birthday party, as well as Speedy Romeo’s, a Bed-Stuy restaurant that doubled as a cafe. In giving viewers a persuasive portrait of how young people are living in New York today, “Girls” has also filmed at Roberta’s, the popular Bushwick pizza restaurant.

These destinations have acquired the same romantic aura that “Sex and the City” once bestowed on establishments as Pastis, a bygone restaurant in the Meatpacking District — a neighborhood made famous by the HBO comedy.

Few shows incorporated the city like the original “Law & Order,” with Benjamin Bratt and Jerry Orbach.NBC

“Girls” just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the show began production, explains executive producer Ilene S. Landress. “Williamsburg was on the radar, but it hadn’t blown up yet,” she says. “It was a slow burn in terms of real estate. Now, Williamsburg is becoming super expensive, so we have the characters in Greenpoint.”

Landress is a veteran of the New York television production scene, having worked on everything from “The Equalizer,” a drama set in New York that was filmed here in the late 1980s, to “The Sopranos.” She firmly believes series like “Girls” make the city a character on the show.

“As much as possible, we try to keep it real,” she says. “We’re really lucky to be in New York, where we have five boroughs as our back lot.”

The hipster comedy will go back into production on its fourth season in April, and Landress is convinced that the proliferation of new restaurants and clubs will give the location scouts even more choices.

“We were finishing last season on Bedford Avenue. It was a night shoot, and while we were setting up, I saw these empty buildings under construction. I said, ‘They’re building us locations for the next season.’ All these places, you don’t really run out of them,” she says. “The whole place is booming.”