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* ''[[Back to The Future]]'' can't seem to decide whether Hill Valley is a decent-sized city or a small town. It's small enough to have a tiny downtown area with no buildings higher than three stories, but it apparently has a large enough population to support at least one very large mall. And that's just in the first film. ''Part III'' adds an entire desert within walking distance of the city while stating that there's a lake which freezes over in winter. Still the series didn't really last long enough to produce anything ''too'' contradictory, though it likely would have if it'd been allowed to continue.
** Of course, the fact that you see the movies in four very separate time periods might have something to do with it.
** The development of Hill Valley over time seems pretty consistent with that of a small town (county seat in this case) enveloped by the suburban expansion of a nearby metropolis.
** Very big malls tend to locate quite far away from big cities due to land costs.
** The hills visible in the background of 20th-Century Hill Valley are completely absent back in the [[Wild West]].
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== Live Action TV ==
* Sunnydale in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''
** It started off being described as a "one Starbucks town" and gradually acquired more buildings, an entire waterfront district, airport, train station, zoo, dam, a community [[College]] and a [[California University|campus of the University of California]].
** It also ''lost'' the entire beach/waterfront portions when the finale needed it to be landlocked.
** Lampshaded in the episode "Buffy vs Dracula" when Riley wondered how he'd never noticed Sunnydale had its own gothic castle. In that case it's presumed that either Dracula teleported his own castle to Sunnydale, assuming residents wouldn't [[Extra-Strength Masquerade|notice or care]], or that the entire episode was caused by reality alteration due to {{spoiler|the retroactive creation of Buffy's sister Dawn}}.
** Common theory is that the fact that Sunnydale is directly on top of a Hellmouth does all sorts of screwy things with the geography.
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** Let's not forget that there are several ''uncharted islands'' off this beach. In Pennsylvania.
*** Does Lake Erie not exist in this particular TV universe?
* Craggy Island, in ''[[Father Ted]]'' parodies this trope. Usually it seems there are only a handful of people living on the island, but in one episode there's an entire Chinatown district Ted never knew about. Even weirder, a hugely disproportionate number of those inhabitants are priests. (For reference, the island of [[wikipedia:Inishbofin, Galway|Inishbofin]], which is in roughly the same place has about 200 inhabitants. No word on how many of those are priests).
** There is one constant: it has no west side. "It just broke loose during some bad weather and floated off."
* The size of Rutherford in ''[[3rd Rock from the Sun]]'' seemed to change between episodes. Sometimes it was implied to be a tiny [[College]] town and other times it seemed to be a decent-sized city.
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** It also has ''historical'' flexibility, with matching scenery. It was settled by the British in the early 1700s (''despite being in California''), and was mostly grassy fields. In the late 1800s, it was full of prospectors, cowboys, and other [[Wild West]] stereotypes, and was mostly barren desert.
** This has led to an interesting (if wrong) assumption by fans that the town ''is'' Los Angeles. ''Power Rangers'' takes place in an alternate universe, and since the British found California before the Spanish, the town was given an English name instead of a Spanish one.
* In ''[[Robin Hood (TV series)|Robin Hood]]'', a convenient orphanage pops up on the outskirts of Locksley right when the outlaws need to dispose of a group of kids. Did they even ''have'' orphanages in those days?
** They were mostly located in monasteries.
* In ''[[Scrubs]]'', the hospital gains and loses aisles right as the plot demands.
* ''[[Smallville]]'' didn't do too badly, the titular town's geography remain stable, as did Metropolis. But it still cropped up from time to time; the Smallville Luthorcorp plant seemed to grow an entire research wing (on a waste treatment plant) and Metropolis was sometimes so close to Smallville you could see it from a not very tall windmill and sometimes far enough away even [[Super Speed]] took a while to get you there.
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* Free Country USA in ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' is whatever size and sophistication level it needs to be for the current cartoon.
** This is even parodied in ''Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People'', where Strong Bad can put other Free Country USA landmarks anywhere he wants on the map, and even rearrange them as he sees fit. His own house starts in the middle, but it's just as mobile. In the second game, he makes a new map by drawing on a Risk-like game map.
** Free Country USA usually appears to be about half a dozen buildings (three houses, the King of Town's castle, the Concession Stand, Coach Z's locker room) in the middle of nowhere, explicitly told not to have roads (or functioning cars), and yet the houses are decently sized, there's utilities, a postal service (and presumably a zip code), Internet access, a few in-story television shows and commercials filmed there, and so forth. [[Rule of Funny|Best not to think too hard about it]].
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' openly embraces this problem. See [[Separate Simpsons Geography Thing]].
* The animated show ''[[Code Lyoko]]'' suffers from this slightly. Most clues to the location of the show put it in France (satellite photos), despite a few episodes contradicting this (such as the visit of a French foreign exchange student). This however, is an artifact of [[Dub
* ''[[Kim Possible]]'': Middleton, apparently a fairly small midwestern town, grew and grew and grew.
** Lampshaded in the season 4 episode "Clothes Minded", when Kim chases Drakken and Shego through a series of increasingly obscure local technical labs that she didn't know Middleton had.
* Parodied in the first episode of ''[[Clerks the Animated Series]]''; when Leonardo Leonardo is opening his new convenience store-slash-shopping mall only a few doors down from the Quick Stop AND his new skyscraper, both Dante and Randall point out how unlikely it is that they wouldn't have noticed such large buildings constructed around them; especially as Leonardo's skyscraper is the ''only skyscraper in the entire town''.
* ''[[Daria]]'': Lawndale is a suburb of Baltimore according to [[Word of God]], but is still perpetually green and within day-trip distance of both deserts lousy with cactus, cowboys, and redneck bars, and mountains subject to sudden blizzards.
* Dimmsdale of ''[[The Fairly
** ''Fairy Idol'' reveals Dimmsdale to be located in southern California, in an area east of Burbank but west of Death Valley. However, there is the fictional snow covered mountainous country of "Tibecuidore" that exists in Central America.
** Dimmsdale is in Imperial County, California, which is at the southeast corner of the state (east of San Diego County and south of Riverside County). Dimmsdale also seems big enough to have a population in the millions, whereas the real Imperial County has a population of slightly over 100,000.
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[[Category:Settings]]
[[Category:Universal Tropes]]
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