I live in Canada but so much media I consume is from the United States that I tend to assume stories take place there by default until told otherwise. Once, I read a book set in England (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) and I assumed it was set in the United States until the main character went to London. But the other day, I watched the new Frankenstein movie and it dawned on me that I didn’t know where Frankenstein takes place but, because it’s based on an older book, I assumed somewhere in Europe.
I disagree. I think a lot of works of fiction, such as the examples I gave, use made up characters but the story is supposed to be accurate to the real world and is supposed to represent things that can plausibly happen
That’s fine, I don’t need you to agree with how I view place settings in works of fiction :)
But I think if you look closely enough, you’ll find there are incongruities just as a natural consequence of having this stuff translated into a format that can be shared like books and movies/tv. At a certain point you’ll have to suspend disbelief for some reason, even if it’s just to believe that all these people can afford to live where they are with the jobs they have (like friends; I haven’t seen either of your examples so I can’t comment on them). That’s the realm of fantasy worlds for me, and that example is entirely a byproduct of needing space to film. It doesn’t mean there’s magic and unicorns, but it’s like a reflection of reality in a warped mirror; close but wrong. Maybe like a parallel universe, but still not our own.
Maybe that stuff doesn’t matter to you as far as where stores are set, and that’s totally fine, but it matters to me to keep real and not real separate.
That is fair. Even stories that are meant to be realistic usually stretch believability at some point. The show Who’s The Boss expected us to believe that Angela unknowingly was married to two men at the same time. Also, most television series and movies take a long time to produce and by the time they’re released, the world may change in significant ways. At the start of the pandemic, for instance, shows were being released that didn’t address the pandemic because they didn’t know it would happen. Some shows chose to continue ignoring the pandemic.