Getting home and putting your feet up in front of the gogglebox is well deserved after a hard day’s toil. It’s nice to sit and see people living a beautiful life, where people’s main concern is brushing their lustrous hair and high-fiving each other. Exhale with sincere relaxation as you visit these heavenly TV destinations. (Our featured image is by Robert Couse-Baker)
If you’d like to see some TV hell destinations, yes, hellish destinations, click here!
Home & Away – Sydney, Australia
There’s no actual plot to the legendary Home & Away – all the people of Summer Bay do is surf and eat burgers.
The show is filmed in Palm Beach, the stunning coastal suburb in the northern part of Sydney. Sydney isn’t quite Summer Bay, but it is Sydney and that’s even better.
Miami Vice – Miami, Florida, USA
Miami Vice was one of the most popular shows of the 1980s. Sure, it depicted Miami as being full of murders and drug trafficking, but everybody was so sharply dressed despite being in the tropics – truly, a vision of heaven.
The fact that Crockett and Tubbs always seemed to need a speedboat to solve every crime was definite proof this was set in an ideal world.
Eldorado – Costa del Sol, Spain
The short-lived British soap opera Eldorado was set in every English person’s idea of heaven: anywhere in Spain where you can get a full English breakfast.
The show featured the delights of the pretty Costa del Sol rather than the fictional city of gold from South American lore because the BBC couldn’t afford to pave everything the camera filmed in precious metal.
The Love Boat – The Caribbean Sea
The sitcom about fun on luxury cruises was unsurprisingly seen as an archetype for how all life should be. The citizens of the late 70s and early 80s watched rapturously at the joy of island hopping, swimming pools and famous guest stars popping up on a weekly basis.
It only needed St Peter standing at the boarding dock to complete its depiction of a maritime heaven.
Friends – Greenwich Village, New York City, USA
New York in the 1990s was famous for muggings, robberies and murders. But oddly, Friends didn’t show this. It made New York seem like an endless cavalcade of sofas and porcelain coffee mugs with pretty people making witty repartee and come-to-bed eyes at each other.
What’s strange is that New York has slowly been gravitating towards this since, as if Friends was some sort of future template. Aren’t New Yorkers lucky?
Ballykissangel – County Wicklow, Ireland
The sexual tension between a priest and a barmaid in BBC drama Ballykissangel made many people gasp after their Sunday dose of Songs of Praise.
Colin Farrell got his first acting break on the show playing a local ne’er-do-well, thus setting the trend for his career as a Hollywood ne’er-do-well.
What was most appealing about the fictional town of Ballykissangel was that it let us enjoy the beauty of the Emerald Isle – it never seemed to rain compared to the almost constant rainfall that County Wicklow enjoys in real life.
Baywatch – Malibu, California, USA
The iconic show about lifeguards running in slow motion for an hour depicted the coast of Los Angeles as absurdly good-looking.
Not only was the weather always perfect but The Hoff glistened like a tanned god surrounded by life-saving cherubim. Sure, people drowned sometimes but they did it in heaven on Earth so they couldn’t have minded.
