An inversion would be most schools portrayed in movies and tv shows tend to be confined in one large building with hallways and indoor cafeterias. In SoCal most classrooms open up into the outside, and lunch is always taken outside (unless it rains, then you need to find a nice teacher to put up with you). It's a bit strange to then see a school supposedly set in SoCal that is all enclosed in one building.

There's a good reason for this. "Outside Schools" were built before widespread air conditioning (many schools still don't have any), so there would be easy and plentiful access to windows. Now that air conditioning is standard in new schools, the trend is going back toward the old design.

Subverted at This Troper's school. There are some classrooms that open up only on the outside, some classrooms that only open up on the inside (like this troper's art classroom), and some classrooms that open up on the inside and the outside. {{It Makes Sense in Context}}, because This Troper lives in the L.A. area, but, my school was built a few years ago.

This troper ''has'' tended to notice that a disproportionately large amount of high schools in fiction (particularly on TV sitcoms) are stately Gothic buildings in red brick that appear to be from the early Victorian area, and also seem to be in suburban surroundings. His high school was a more "modern" building (constructed in 1962), and he used to joke about the school seeming more "urban" and "ghetto" (it was not far from the city's downtown area) than the schools always seen on sitcoms.

Moreover, most supposedly-SoCal schools are shown to be multiple stories and have lockers. This troper lived in Southern California for her entire childhood and saw maybe one two-story school, and many schools have been removing lockers for fear that students will keep drugs/weapons/etc in them.

Really? This troper still ''lives'' in [=SoCal=] and has not seen a single high school without lockers (and while there are one-story high schools, most are two-story).

This troper also lives in Sourthern California, and can tell you that, while highschools generally have a couple two-story buildings, they have more one-story ones (out here, the classrooms are spread out among separate buildings). And every middle or high school, and even a handful of elementary schools, have lockers. It's just that students are subject to random locker checks whenever the school wants, without having to ask, and the right to seize your possessions. No 4th Amendment at school.

''[=~Reno 911!~=]'' depicts a curiously-palm-tree-bedecked version of Reno. Nevada and Arizona are just as dotted with palm trees that aren't even native to Southern California, but ThisTroper right here lives in Reno, and has yet to see a palm tree, especially in the locations on the show that show them in abundance. It's actually more common to see cherry blossom trees than anything.

ThisTroper always interpreted them to be artificial or foreign palm trees, like the kind you'll find around some Vegas hotels.

This Troper noticed that all high school stories set in Southern California have Libby}} Libby cheerleaders. It's the opposite at This Troper's school, since the cheerleaders at her school are actually nice people.

Actually, the Mojave Desert is the closest desert to L.A. This Troper has been there many times, but the only saguaro cacti I've seen there are in gardens and landscaping. The native cacti aren't nearly as magnificent looking.

Actually, LosAngeles ''itself'' is a desert. It's just hard to see once you've covered it up with hundreds of square miles of concrete. But that sort of explains all the sand and rock underneath the concrete, and the fact that it rains only about 3 weeks out of the year and has that whole "hell on earth during the day, cold at night" thing going on.

L.A. is not a "desert" as it is popularly conceived (e.g., the Mojave or Sonoran desert). The area receives more rainfall and has milder temperatures. This L.A. native doesn't know where you're getting the "hell on Earth" thing, as extreme heat only happens in August and September-- and even then, it's usually nothing compared to many parts of the Southwest and the humid hell that is the Southeast in August. This September (2010) was a rare exception, with recorded temperatures reaching the 110's. And droughts recently have made the annual precipitation fall below average on some years.

Stories set ostensibly in places such as Ohio or Connecticut have characters wearing tee-shirts and other spring appropriate clothes in the middle of ''January''.

Could be justified once or twice with Ohio, since we often have unseasonable weather, but since we also get nasty winters, more times than that is silly.

But see also DreamingOfAWhiteChristmas...

This Ohio Troper had a teacher who wore sandals with no socks in deep snow, so that's not entirely inaccurate.

And this troper has seen numerous individuals wear tee-shirts and tanks in freezing weather, even in 17* F weather. For people who live in very cold climates, just because the snow isn't melting doesn't mean it isn't warm outside.

This is common in the Northern states. T-Shirts & sweat pants are still worn in the dead of winter. If it's even a little above freezing, though, count on seeing shorts.

Carbonated soft drinks are always "soda, " never "pop, " "cola, " or "coke." Compare.

Then again, "Coke" ''is'' trademarked, very heavily.

So are Kleenex and Band-Aids, but you'll still hear people use them as common nouns.

"Ya'll want a coke?" "Sure." "What kind?" "Dr. Pepper."

Averted on That70sShow, which was set in Wisconsin. The characters almost always said "pop".

Which is odd, because this troper has lived in Wisconsin all her life and has always said "soda"...

Metropolitan areas are large, sprawling, and separated by hundreds of miles of countryside. (Nothing at all like the relatively compact and closely spaced cities of the Northeast and Midwest.)

Northeast, maybe. This troper lives in Nebraska, and there's lots of countryside between most of the cities in this part of the country. Oklahoma is the same. Maybe it's an East vs West thing?

Cities? In Nebraska?

Compact and closely spaced cities in the US are typical of the northern half of the country. However, even in New Jersey there are giant tracts of largely empty forest.

Plenty of countryside in TheDeepSouth (although our cities tend to be smaller).

Utah's Wasatch Front metropolitan area is in its own strange way simultaneously both of these concepts, with a lot of sprawl in the north-south direction, but densely packed in the east-west direction because they hug the lofty mountains just to the east and the adjacent west desert is barely habitable. Wherever you are, you're never far away from undeveloped countryside, and yet you can still drive in the right direction and never stop seeing city for at least an hour or two. I imagine many other cities are similar to this wherever urban development has rather strict geographical limits in two opposing directions--for instance the densely urbanized Nile River in Egypt (there's a ''reason'' the Pyramids and the Sphinx in the nearby desert aren't ''city'' landmarks).

This is oddly subverted with shows set in major cities that have tourist destinations, where characters move effortlessly from landmark to landmark, (and even from city to city) without stopping anywhere else due to the EiffelTowerEffect. Geography Does Not Work That Way! This is less noticeable in the South and Midwest, where cities have a single small downtown and everything else is {{Suburbia}}.