Boston does not have a shortage of film and television set here. It has a shortage of Boston in them.
For decades, the camera has returned to the same corridor: cops, robbers, political operators, and a certain strain of white working-class male volatility.
We all know the cinematic trope. “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” “Mystic River.” “The Departed.” “The Town.” “Black Mass.” Each set in a Boston that functions less as a real city than as a mythology — the most usable canvas for white urban toughness in contemporary American cinema.
You can watch a decade’s worth of Boston films and never meaningfully enter Chinatown as a lived neighborhood. Never see Dominican hair salons or Brazilian flags. And never step inside the kind of Jamaican restaurant or bodega that anchors entire blocks.
Yet Boston has the second-largest Dominican population in the United States. Its public schools are around 85 percent nonwhite. Its immigrant communities are central to the city’s daily life.
Bostonians who move elsewhere often hear some version of “I didn’t know there were [fill in the blank] people in Boston.” Others are met with surprise when they mention that Donnie Yen or Donna Summer came from here. That disbelief comes from decades of selective storytelling.
This matters because it narrows the public imagination of who belongs here. If Boston is consistently depicted as white ethnic grievance, institutional scandal, and blue-collar combustion, then its academic density, immigrant vitality, artistic ecosystems, and multiracial civic life recede from national view. That distortion shapes perception. Perception shapes who feels welcome. Who feels welcome shapes who arrives, who invests, and who stays.
The pattern holds across comedies, legal dramas, medical procedurals, prestige thrillers, and romantic comedies. “Cheers” is about a white bar. “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal” are largely white law series. “St. Elsewhere” is a predominantly white hospital drama. “Fever Pitch” is a romcom built around a particular Red Sox fan demographic, the same stratum celebrated in “Celtic Pride.” “Boston Public” depicts a school system that is more white than it is in reality and filters that world almost entirely through white characters’ eyes.
There are exceptions. “Blue Hill Avenue,” a movie released in 2001, was set in the heart of Black Boston and has been cited as a different kind of story about the city. But “Blue Hill Avenue” was shot largely in St. John, New Brunswick — which may explain why its Roxbury feels like a place no Roxbury resident would recognize.
The TV series “Rizzoli & Isles” used contemporary Roxbury and Dorchester settings — but that’s a partial credit, because the show was still a procedural drama told from the point of view of two white women.
The pattern runs in both directions. When Hollywood does tell a story that originated in Black Boston, the city itself often disappears. The LL Cool J film “In Too Deep,” based on the real story of Roxbury drug kingpin Darryl “God” Whiting, was set in Cincinnati. TV’s “Survivor’s Remorse,” which followed a Boston family navigating sudden wealth and fame, relocated them to Atlanta for its entire run.
Because Boston isn’t sprawling, class, race, and power exist in close physical proximity. That should produce narrative friction we rarely see. Instead, Boston often appears as a generic tough Northeast city. Outside of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Social Network,” our intellectual infrastructure is rarely treated as cinematic.
Crime is marketable. Corruption is marketable. The mythology of Whitey Bulger is marketable. Non-rhotic accents are marketable.
But so are other realities — ones that have never received the same institutional backing.
In the late 1990s, clergy, community organizers, and police collaborated in what became known as The Boston Miracle, helping reduce youth gun homicides to historic lows. In 1999 and 2000, the city recorded just one youth-related gun homicide, after averaging dozens during the crack epidemic. That story had genuine stakes, real tension, moral ambiguity, and fragile coalition-building across communities that distrusted one another. When it finally did reach the screen, as “City on a Hill,” law enforcement figures were romanticized and community leaders reduced.
Long before civil rights icons were monuments, they were students here — dating, studying, organizing. Think of W.E.B. DuBois, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (future Atlanta mayor) Maynard Jackson, Malcolm X. Boston has been at the forefront of national movements since the abolitionists. But incubation is quieter than confrontation. It’s harder to package than a climactic courtroom scene or an urban gunfight. It is, apparently, harder to finance.
The Massachusetts film tax incentives of the early 2000s drew significant production to the region and helped establish a self-sustaining infrastructure — locations, crews, institutional knowledge — that reinforced the archetype already in place. That archetype, once profitable, became self-protecting. A multicultural Boston — Caribbean-inflected, academic, immigrant, artistic — would require new storytelling frameworks, new casting assumptions, new marketing language. It would complicate a mythology that studios already know how to sell.
TV and film have never fictionalized or cast Melnea Cass, Ruth Batson, Mel King, the Rev. Eugene Rivers, Tommie Atkins, or the Rev. Michael Haynes. Local fixtures, in most cases for three decades. Boston street cred only sells if it’s earned via violence.
What of the activists, educators, and coaches who were household names locally but invisible nationally? Or the Boston Shootout, the prestigious high school basketball tournament that drew elite talent from major US cities for nearly three decades? Its origin story alone would make compelling cinema. The Chinese tongs, or secret societies, that shaped early Chinatown power structures? The layered histories of Puerto Rican enterprise and upward mobility running alongside — and sometimes in conflict with — neighborhood gangs?
Contrast this with what other American cities are permitted to be on screen. Los Angeles can be “Room 222,” “Sanford & Son,” and “Boyz n the Hood” — comedy, domestic life, and tragedy across generations. Not just “L.A. Law.” Chicago can be “Good Times,” “The Chi,” and “Chicago Fire” — not only “Chicago Hope.” Baltimore is “Roc,” “Homicide,” and “The Wire” — not merely “Diner,” “Avalon,” and “Liberty Heights.” Each city carries multiple ethnic and emotional identities on screen. Each city gets to show Black, Asian, and Latino life in its full range: everyday, comic, tragic, aspirational, routine.
Boston is rarely afforded that breadth. Doing so would complicate the brand.
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