In the realm of the Pacific Northwest, Portland is often shrugged off as Seattle’s geekier younger sibling, and we here at FLUX think that’s a cryin’ shame. More and more, Portland, Oregon is finding its place in film and on TV, both as a setting and a filming location, and to celebrate that fact, we’ve decided to highlight some of the city’s most shining moments in the moving pictures, starting with a new drama from The CW.
There couldn’t be a better subject to start this column with than “Life Unexpected”, a new teen drama set in the City of Roses that premiered on The CW Network in late January. Although “Life Unexpected” is primarily filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, it gets its references to Portland right: mentions of Voodoo Doughnut abound, along with surprisingly appropriate shots of the MAX light rail, the Steel Bridge, and Chinatown throughout the first two episodes.
And the show, which opened to solid ratings and positive critical reviews, may well become the first TV show set in Portland to last more than one season (I kid, of course – the 1970s McLean Stevenson sitcom “Hello, Larry” managed to survive two disastrous years before an unceremonious canning). It stars Kristoffer Polaha as a bartender and Shiri Appleby as a radio morning show host who take in their teenage birth child after sixteen years apart. The former’s job is a nod to Oregon’s tasty beer culture, while the latter’s is an apparently common Pacific Northwest profession, if one is to extrapolate from the title characters of Seattle-based “Frasier” and the aforementioned “Hello, Larry”.
A montage of some of Stumptown’s best scene-setting local cameos from the first two episodes is above.
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