Los Angeles has served as a featured backdrop and uncredited star of movies and television shows for more than a hundred years. A town nicknamed for its greatest industry, you may know it as Hollywood, La La Land or Tinseltown. 

And sometimes, without anyone even realizing it, L.A. goes by other names, including “the city that never sleeps”, “the windy city” or even “the city of brotherly love.” 

For as long as we’ve been watching, filmmakers have worked to make us believe we’re seeing faraway places on screen, while never actually taking their cameras outside of Los Angeles County. 

Los Angeles has played the role of many cities across the globe, but today we’ll be setting our sights on just one: the City of Philadelphia. While you might be thinking to yourself, “Oh c’mon, LA and Philly are nothing alike,” it just takes a little movie magic to transform palm tree lined streets into a historic east coast stand-in...  

“We honestly drive around, looking for a lot of brick,” confided Stephenson Crossley, Location Manager for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “We look for stretches of streets or buildings that fit that city look.” 

It’s Always Sunny, which is on its 17th season, films primarily in Los Angeles. Set around a family-owned Irish Pub, one of the show’s main locations is the Starkman Building in the Downtown Arts District. While the show films often downtown, they also have locations in Culver City, Chinatown, Unincorporated LA County and even in Northern California (to mimic the cliffs of Ireland).  

How to Get Away with Murder, (which ran from 2014-2020) is another popular production having used LA as a stand in for Philadelphia throughout the entire series. “It wasn’t too hard, just because you could stay downtown and utilize that area. It kind of looks like any town,” explained Location Manager Jason Kaplon.  

“We also went to Koreatown, and the Adams District because there were a lot of clapboard houses and really old houses. Wherever anything was old. One thing we faced: there are no red curbs in Philadelphia, so we had to create these covers and bring them to every location and put them on.” 

In addition to red curbs, another hallmark of LA, the palm tree, didn’t quite fit the Philadelphia aesthetic. “Definitely no palm trees,” Kaplon recalled.  “We would either frame them out or just dress the bottom half of it… you know, make it look like it's either a bush or a different kind of tree.” Nowadays, the It’s Always Sunny team goes a little more high-tech with their filming in 2025, “Our VFX Supervisor John Myers can practically remove trees with his mind,” Crossley explained. 

With so many productions leaving Los Angeles these days, some may wonder why productions like this don’t film in the place where they are set. Why not shoot Philadelphia for Philadelphia?  

According to Crossley, working in Los Angeles is great for many reasons. Production can build sets outside without fear of impending weather, film on them year-round, and his team can work where their families also live. For Kaplon, it’s also about the infrastructure.