Where is 'Your Honor' filmed? See the locations for the crime drama

The portrayal of New Orleans in compelling crime drama 'Your Honor', starring ‘Breaking Bad’ star Bryan Cranston, is brilliantly refreshing

By James Medd

16 March 2021

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A 10-part miniseries, Your Honor sees the return of Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston in a lead television role. This time around, he’s Michael Desiato, a respected and highly principled judge who runs into a moral quagmire when his son Adam (Hunter Doohan) is involved in a car crash. With a high-quality cast, including The Affair’s Maura Tierney and Michael Stuhlbarg as gangster boss Jimmy Baxter, it’s a properly gripping thriller that perfectly treads the line between entertainment and tension.

With its setting in New Orleans, it also gives us a great sense of place. As Cranston told Entertainment Weekly, the city’s presence verges on the ‘character in its own right’ cliché: ‘There’s a vibrancy, a history, a sexiness to it,’ he said, ‘the life, the food, the jazz, the people. And there’s also an underbelly to New Orleans that can’t be denied.’

As Cranston hints, this isn’t the New Orleans of Mardi Gras and marching jazz bands. We glimpse both sides of it, to an extent rarely seen since The Wire gave us Baltimore in all its glory and horror. The city has a healthy track record on film: a host of atmospheric movies from Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law to 1986 police drama The Big Easy, a string of John Grisham adaptations in the 1990s to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the 2000s. On TV, though, apart from Treme (from The Wire’s David Simon), it’s often typecast as Voodoo Town, with two seasons of American Horror Story and vampire tale The Originals both set in the city. Your Honor helps set the record straight, with grit and glamour given equal billing. Here’s a guide to both sides of the track.

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GARDEN DISTRICT
This wealthy neighbourhood in the heart of the city is where Desiato’s house is placed (filmed at an undisclosed private home) but it’s also one of the hubs around which the story is told, as seen when Adam cycles through the area in episode four. Early in episode one Desiato jogs to Lafayette Cemetery No 1 on Prytania Street: used heavily in the film Interview with the Vampire, as well as The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, here the location is given its dignity and also provides a major plot point.
Just around the block from the cemetery on Washington Avenue is the restaurant Commander’s Palace, which we see as the venue for a dinner in honour of Adam in episode eight. Its courtyard is one of the most popular destinations in the city.
One of the series’ key locations is also nearby: the Crescent City Connection, the two bridges that cross the Mississippi River. Linking the Garden District to the poorer areas of New Orleans, they are seen throughout the show, starting with Adam’s fateful drive at the start of episode one.
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FRENCH QUARTER
New Orleans’s most famous district gives us a splash of colour and chaos in episode five when Desiato runs into a festival, the fancy-dress drink-up Red Dress Run, on his way to a rendezvous on Bourbon Street. For the series, though, the area is most significant as the location of The Baxter House restaurant, HQ of mob boss Jimmy Baxter. For this, the production used the Bourbon Orleans Hotel on Orleans Street, a former theatre and ballroom built in the early 19th century, later converted into a convent before being restored to its current opulence.
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UPTOWN
This area, which is much more central than the name suggests, is where several turning points take place in the series. Ted’s Frostop diner on Calhoun Street is where Desiato meets his friend Charlie (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and sets in motion some of the show’s most far-reaching decisions. We see them here first in episode two and again in episode six, and it’s also where Charlie receives some vital information from Adam.
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MID-CITY
This largely nondescript residential neighbourhood gives us one of the stars of Your Honor, the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court on Tulane Avenue (pictured). Desiato works in this grand Thirties complex, and filming takes in both the pillared façade and the tall vaulted halls.
Also nearby is the MidCity Veterinary Hospital on Orleans Avenue, where Desiato visits in episode five, as well as CC’s Coffee House on Esplanade Avenue. Here, Adam, working on his application to university, bumps into Fia Baxter (Lilli Kay) and triggers one of the series’ fiendish twists.

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LOWER NINTH WARD
The site of the greatest devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this side of New Orleans is vastly different to the Garden District life Desiato is used to. The accident takes place here in episode one, at the crossing of Caffin Avenue and North Galvez Street, after Adam has visited the site of his mother’s death.
It’s also the location for the home of the Jones family, first introduced in a trial in Desiato’s court. There he mentions the house, which he jogs past, as ‘5700 Flood Street in the Lower Ninth’, though filming actually took place on nearby Royal Street.
In episode one, we see Adam driving through the neighbouring Seventh Ward, stopping at the Claiborne Express Conoco gas station on North Claiborne Avenue. Following that road east and back to the Lower Ninth takes us to the Claiborne Avenue Bridge. Officially known as the Judge William Seeber Bridge, this is where Desiato stops at the end of episode one for a rather dark purpose and runs into a passing police patrol car. His reaction here gives us a taste of the Breaking-Bad turns to come.
Keep scrolling for stills for more pictures from the show. ‘Your Honor’ began screening on Sky Atlantic on Tuesdays at 9pm from 2 March 2021, and is available to stream as a boxset on Now TV
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TopicsStyle & Culture Art & Culture On location New Orleans USA North America