Seven years later, Portlandia is finally ending. The sentiment around town, at least among anyone who lived here prior to its premiere, is "good riddance. In , we half-jokingly conducted a poll trying to determine the exact date when "Old Portland" supposedly died. Somehow, this little sketch show on an obscure cable network portraying Portland as a fantasyland of socially awkward liberal narcissists convinced the whole world to move here, driving up rents, clogging the freeways and replacing your favorite dive bar with an artisanal knot store.
It misrepresented the city, then those misrepresentations became reality. They paved paradise and put a bird on it. Nobody necessarily worried about this happening when the show first started. It's a misnomer to say the city was ever totally on-board with Portlandia , but the reasons for being wary of it were different—mostly, we just didn't like being made fun of.
With the final season beginning Jan. I really wish people in Portland would stop doing things that make the rest of the country hate us. But nope! A show which has had a net negative effect on our neighborhood and the city of Portland as a whole.
Absolutely Fabulous made fun of a public relations executive and a magazine fashion director and the incredibly insular world in which they live Credit: Alamy. For better or worse, its influence was spreading much more widely than anyone had originally anticipated. Broad City took a more traditional sitcom approach to similar issues, depicting the codependent lives of two nearly broke Millennial women as they endure weird sex requests, bad jobs and clingy boyfriends. As a result, Dunham became the poster child for the worst of self-indulgent liberalism.
Perhaps what Portlandia has shown us is that the difference between the two is slighter than we originally thought. Like all of the great shows built on self-mockery, Portlandia has made us laugh at it and with it, but with those laughs, it has also tricked us into caring.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. My methodology? I spoke to a random smattering of locals -- both transplants and natives -- to give us their take on what gives behind the backlash. Now here we are, living in a facsimile of the laziest show on IFC, but that's our fault; we traded our stories for theirs and got ripped off.
I just wish Portlandia had dug up some wit while they were selling us out. In other words, three pinnacle things that define living in most places in America.
The thing that's so frustrating to me about Portlandia is that it latched onto one minute aspect of a place and represented it as the whole. There are 2 million people in the metro area. Some of them are refugees. Some of them are Nazis. But most of them are doing what people all over do: trying to pay the rent and prepare a little for tomorrow. It's pretty hit-or-miss. I think people hate on it more than they should, but that's Portland hipsters for you.
But then there are other times, like with the bookstore thing, where it just seems like the SNL fraternity punching down. By Les Chappell. Shop Early Black Friday Deals. TV Reviews Portlandia.
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