In coming months, it will be possible for the committed DVR user to subsist solely on Brooklyn-centric programming: HBO, home to How to Make It in America and Bored to Death, is adding Lena Dunham’s Girls, which follows CBS’s 2 Broke Girls, which is set to be joined by the similarly set-in-Williamsburg I Just Want My Pants Back, on MTV. Considering that these series are all broadly about youthful adventures, and that the borough is the global capital of a certain strain of young-person culture, the confluence makes sense. But it also represents just one side of Brooklyn’s ongoing Hollywood moment. There are also the endless shoots. Carroll Gardens alone has provided backdrops for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, New Year’s Eve, Treme (the show takes place in New Orleans, but one of its characters, a chef played by Kim Dickens, moves to restaurant-packed Brooklyn to find work), and the time-traveling Men in Black 3 (whose location scouts, like the gentrifiers before them, were presumably taken with the vaguely retro vibe).
Because I live in Carroll Gardens, I can tell you that the aforementioned productions have been absolute murder on parking. And yet, walking past clipboard-toting P.A.’s and hulking trailers occupying long stretches of curb where the cars of many of my neighbors would ordinarily sit, I’ve found myself welcoming the interlopers. And I think I know why.
Part of the promise of the city is that making it your home puts you ever within reach of the new and the exciting. The reality, as you get older and start a family, can be one of proximity to exciting new restaurants and bars you never quite manage to get to enjoy, of access to culture you resign yourself to only reading about, the way you can also do from a nice, spacious house in the suburbs. But then suddenly your part of New York is filled with film crews; right outside your door, creative people are crafting moments that the rest of the world has to wait to see—and better still, you got your behind-the-scenes pass simply by making your regular trip to the subway. There’s a thrill to these discoveries, not that you show it. Instead, you keep strolling blithely by. After all, in your city, stuff like this happens all the time.