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09/10/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/10/2026 03:17

What These Emmy-Nominated Shows Reveal About Hollywood’s Impact on Local Economies

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September 10, 2026

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When a film or television production arrives in a community, elected officials often promise jobs, tourism and new investment. States compete for that business by offering tax breaks, financial incentives, public land and other forms of support.

But who actually benefits when Hollywood comes to town?

Curtis Marez, a professor at the University of California San Diego Department of Ethnic Studies, studies the economic, racial and political consequences of producing film and television outside Hollywood. His work examines what happens when productions move into lower-income areas of the United States and how the realities behind the camera sometimes register - directly or symbolically - onscreen.

Marez, who is the author of Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places, said the promise that film productions will create broad local prosperity is only partly borne out. "They don't really hire a lot of local people in skilled production roles," he said. "Instead, many of the jobs that reach local residents are service positions, such as hotel room cleaners" - work he described as often "low-wage, gendered and racialized." Drawing on economists who have studied film incentive programs, Marez argues that public funds could often produce greater benefits if they were invested directly in education, health care and other social services.

Ahead of this year's Emmy Awards on Sept. 14, Marez discussed what four nominated shows - Widow's Bay, Pluribus, DTF St. Louis and Beef - reveal about Hollywood's effect on the places where television is made. "These are good shows, and viewers can appreciate what they accomplish onscreen," Marez said. "I'm offering a critical interpretation of the whole package - not just what's on the screen, but how it was made." To fans, he says, "Don't get mad at me. If I were just reading them in isolation, I would think, 'Wow, that's great,'" he said. "But there's this whole other side of how the production was made."

Authored by Curtis Marez, professor in UC San Diego's Department of Ethnic Studies at the School of Social Sciences, "Producing Precarity" is an examination of the television industry's practice of "offshoring" production to impoverished sites within the US.

What does Widow's Bay reveal about the relationship between Hollywood and local communities?

One of my favorite early scenes is when the mayor meets with a reporter from The New York Times. The mayor really wants Widow's Bay to become the new Martha's Vineyard.

He boasts about having the best lobster in America, and when the reporter brings up a famous lobster restaurant in Provincetown, the mayor responds by saying "f***k Provincetown." He is aggressively trying to market the island.

I see that as an almost allegorical representation of what is happening on the ground in Massachusetts. Local officials are not only trying to attract tourists; they are also trying to attract television and film producers.

The supernatural plot is a hyperbolic version of that dynamic. We eventually learn that the community's problems originate with a pact between the town's founder and an evil force.

I see that pact as a sensational representation of the pact Hollywood makes with local officials - an arrangement that can indirectly hurt poorer people who do not receive the social spending or public resources that instead go toward attracting Hollywood.

Albuquerque, New Mexico - May 7, 2021: Exterior of the Twisters fast food restaurant, which was used as a filming location for Los Pollos Hermanos in Breaking Bad. Credit: Melissa Kopka/iStock.

What does Pluribus reveal about Hollywood's relationship with New Mexico?

It is interesting to place Pluribus alongside Widow's Bay because, in both cases, what the shows reveal about their local context is connected to what they decide not to show.

Across the Vince Gilligan television universe, it is remarkable that three series can be set in New Mexico - "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul" and now "Pluribus" - with virtually no Indigenous context.

There is little engagement with Indigenous people in the plots and very little Indigenous representation, even though New Mexico has a large and highly visible Indigenous population.

This is not a case of Indigenous communities being out of sight and therefore out of mind during production. When filmmakers use certain locations, they may need to obtain permission, file paperwork and pay fees to Indigenous nations. This is the case with Breaking Bad's famous use of To'Hajiilee, which is part of the Navaho Nation, to film crime scenes.

The production is materially interacting with Indigenous people and land, but if all you knew about New Mexico came from these television programs, you would have no idea how large and important the Indigenous population is.

Leaving that out helps reinforce the idea that settler colonialism belongs to the distant past rather than being an ongoing reality.

DTF St. Louis is set in Missouri but was actually filmed in Georgia. What does that choice reveal?

Jason Bateman has his own production company and this is at least his third production filmed in Georgia but set somewhere else.

Ozark is set in Missouri. The Outsider was filmed in Georgia but set in a fictional Oklahoma town. DTF St. Louis is set in a fictional town outside St. Louis.

What is interesting is that these productions do not showcase the Georgia landscape. That causes the specificity of places to evaporate. If one place can play any other place, regional distinctiveness gets muted. It becomes like a world filled with the same fast-food chains.

But it also distorts the political and social situation in the place where the production is actually filming.

For example, Watchmen offers a particularly revealing comparison. It is set in Oklahoma but was filmed in Georgia.

I thought it was a great show, and its content was explicitly anti-racist and anti-Klan. But it was filmed in areas where Confederate memorials are everywhere. To make Georgia stand in for another state, filmmakers have to work hard to keep those memorials out of the frame.

At the same time, the state government supplying television producers with subsidies has been committed to preserving Confederate memorials in the face of protests.

So Hollywood production benefits from the largesse of that state government while making the visible signs of its racial politics disappear.

Group cinema set. Credit: guruXOOX/iStock.

Beef was filmed in California, including Santa Barbara and Camarillo. What do those locations reveal?

The country club was apparently a combination of the Montecito Country Club in Santa Barbara and another country club in Camarillo.

Santa Barbara and Camarillo are almost a tale of two cities. Santa Barbara is a very wealthy coastal enclave. Camarillo is a different kind of community and is relatively poor compared with Santa Barbara.

By mashing up those two locations, you lose the sense of the difference between the regions. One is much wealthier than the other.

That is interesting in relation to a show about competition, class inequality and people whose appearances of success do not necessarily match their economic reality.

The geography also raises questions about affordability. Even many faculty members who teach at UC Santa Barbara cannot afford to live in Santa Barbara. So it is worth asking where the characters could realistically afford to live in relation to the affluent spaces they occupy.

Can a television show have progressive content while its production still contributes to inequality?

Absolutely. That is an important part of my research.

I sometimes analyze programs with content that seems liberal, progressive, feminist or anti-racist. The ideas and representations onscreen can be admirable.

But the production behind the scenes can still be exploitative and can materially reproduce inequality through transfers of public wealth.

Sometimes the progressive content becomes a shiny object: Look over here at the message onscreen rather than at what is happening behind the scenes.

People sometimes talk about Hollywood as the radical left. The content may sometimes look that way, but Hollywood is also an industry and a business.

What should viewers take away when they watch these Emmy-nominated shows?

Viewers do not have to stop appreciating the shows. They can enjoy the performances, writing and visual worlds while also asking what those worlds leave out.

With Widow's Bay, that means noticing the bargain between local leaders and outside investment, as well as the Indigenous history missing from its founding story.

With Pluribus, it means seeing how television draws visual and economic value from New Mexico while also largely excluding Indigenous presence.

With DTF St. Louis, it means recognizing that Georgia supports and hosts the production while being made to look like somewhere else.

And with Beef, it means considering how the series blends Santa Barbara and Camarillo - two communities with different levels of wealth - into one seamless coastal setting, obscuring the economic distance between them.

Each show tells a fictional story. But each production also tells a material story about land, labor, public money and who ultimately benefits when Hollywood comes to town.

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