Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The opening shot of I Am Not Okay With This follows a blood-splattered Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis) she as she walks through the abandoned streets of a Rust Belt town. The town, specifically, is Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Brownsville, PA is a real place that you can visit in real life, and it served as the primary filming location for Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This.
Located outside Pittsburgh, Brownsville, PA was once a booming center of commerce and a last major pit stop for pioneers traveling west in the early days of America. Today, though, with its weathered look and historic buildings, Brownsville, PA feels like a relic, and Sydney isn’t exactly impressed with the place. Only a few minutes into I Am Not Okay With This, Sydney slams her adopted hometown in the worst way possible.
“We moved to Pennsylvania two years ago. And not, like, a cute part of Pennsylvania either, but corn and cabbage and shit,” Sydney tells us. “Like, my town’s won the grand prize for most polluted air in America for a bunch of years in a row now, so…yippee.”
(Note: the real Browsville, PA doesn’t appear to have any major air pollution issues today.)
Now it’s worth nothing that I Am Not Okay With This is based on a graphic novel by acclaimed artist and writer Chuck Forsman. While the original text doesn’t name Sydney’s hometown, Forsman himself is from Pennsylvania. When Decider got the chance to visit the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania set of I Am Not Okay With This last summer, director and creator Jonathan Entwistle told journalists that Forsman’s own biography informed the show’s setting.
“Chuck is from Pennsylvania and he was very excited when the idea of this place came up,” Entwistle said, before admitting they also considered setting the series in Oregon, but they worried the look was too reminiscent of Stranger Things.
“So we found a town called Brownsville, which is down the Monongahela [River], and it’s just amazing. It’s a backlot, like it’s untouched,” Entwistle said. “I just thought how do you do it differently. I’m always looking for like the slight difference. I don’t need to rewrite the whole wheel of superheroes, but just simply putting someone not walking down a suburban street, putting them in a kind of row houses or by a river with a thousand bridges going down the river just immediately kind of changes the aesthetic completely.”
“I’ve seen blue collar, but I’ve seen Detroit or I’ve seen Brooklyn or I’ve seen Hell’s Kitchen. I’ve seen it done like that way before, but I’ve never seen rural, semi-suburban, steel town superheroes, I don’t think,” he said.
While Brownsville, PA provided I Am Not Okay With This with the perfect exterior locations for Sydney’s town, there was a key location from the comics that production designer Maya Sigel had to recreate on a set: the fire watchtower. Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) mentions the fire watchtower to Syd in passing, and later it becomes a key location for an important scene.
“At first, Jonathan always knew that he wanted a fire watchtower, so we scouted all of the fire watchtowers within three hours of Pittsburgh, and there were only four of them. And a lot of them were so run down that you couldn’t even get up to the top,” Sigel said. “They were much smaller and they were [made] of metal. So this was based on some reference photos of fire watchtowers. And I just knew we would need more space, and it would need to be open and we have this deck around the side for that scene.”
So you can visit Sydney’s hometown of Brownsville, PA any time you like, but don’t expect to find the I Am Not Okay With This fire watchtower anywhere in real life.
I Am Not Okay With This Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.
