Pittsburgh’s Inexact Translations

If you read the Magazine section of yesterday’s Post Gazette, you may have noticed an ironic pairing of articles about the new, and inevitably disappointing sitcom set in Pittsburgh, “Romantically Challenged.”  The first article, “Love for Penguins behind City’s setting for ‘Romantically Challenged,’” explains creator, Ricky Blitt’s crazed enthusiasm for Pittsburgh Hockey, while the review immediately following the article begins, “The first thing for Pittsburgh viewers to know about ABC’s ‘Romantically Challenged’ is that it does not feel Pittsburgh-y.”  

So why is that Pittsburgh so often fails to translate with any degree of accuracy to television or film?  Or, maybe more accurately, why haven’t many people tried to make this translation?  

It seems to me that most of the time films and TV shows think of the city in two of the following reductive forms: 1. Pittsburgh as generic mid-sized city OR 2. Pittsburgh as “Hell with the lid off.”  Where the former makes no effort to consider the “place-ness” of Pittsburgh, the latter relies on out-dated stereotypes to construct the “Flight from [insert unsatisfactory hometown here]” narrative… Can’t blame them for trying, though, right?  

On the other hand, there have been a handful of films as of late that have utilized Pittsburgh more fully (think Adventureland, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, She’s Out of My League).  The city, in these films, is not presented as a caricature, nor is it used merely as a scenic backdrop; the place is intimately connected to the protagonist.

Of course, I don’t mean to make any kind of value judgement about these films based solely on this criteria - after all, I’ve been kind of unfairly using a lens of realism to examine genres that don’t strive for realism - but we are left with a number of questions concerning the way artists and writers develop these thumbnail sketches of our city - one of the biggest questions being, to what degree are steel and sports our inescapable representational modes?