Los Angeles is ever-changing. Nowhere is that more evident than at the many film studios that dot the city’s landscape, where façades are regularly altered and rehabbed for each new production that comes along. Case in point? The backlot residence at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank that portrays the Theta Pi Delta fraternity house on the HBO Max original series “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” Situated on the facility’s Midwest Street, an idyllic Anywhere, U.S.A.-inspired small-town set comprised of a smattering of homes, a town square and a sequence of storefronts, the structure has appeared in countless iterations in countless movies and television shows over the years.
So prolific is the home and its surroundings onscreen, in fact, that historian Steven Bingen states in his 2014 book “Warner Bros.: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot,” “The shadow this street has cast on American popular culture is so far-reaching that people watching this real estate on TV today have no idea that the same set was watched by their parents and by their parents’ parents as well. Or that each generation probably assumed against all logic or evidence that their parents or grandparents had probably lived in such a place.” Charming, pastoral and thoroughly photogenic, Midwest Street is the perfect embodiment of small-town Americana. Though it has portrayed copious cities in productions both big and small, the set is perhaps best known as River City, Iowa from “The Music Man,” Hazzard County, Ga. from “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Stars Hollow, Conn. from “Gilmore Girls” and Rosewood, Pa. from “Pretty Little Liars.”
Tucked away on the southern portion of the streetscape on a diminutive 240-foot curving roadway lined with pristinely manicured lawns and pruned trees is the Theta Pi Delta fraternity house, one of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” most prominent locations. Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, the dramedy chronicles the lives of four roommates, Kimberly Finkle (Pauline Chalamet), Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur), Leighton Murray (Reneé Rapp) and Whitney Chase (Alyah Chanelle Scott), as they navigate their freshman year at the fictional Essex College in Vermont. Launched in late 2021 to rave reviews, the series’ sophomore season hit the streamer this past November, garnering much the same response.
Filming of “Sex Lives” is an ambitious affair that had cast and crew traversing both the West and East Coasts to complete season one, with Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. standing in for most Essex exteriors and Warner Bros. Studio serving as a sort of home base, where the show’s many soundstage-built sets were created and production offices set up. The latest season brought with it a significant location change, with the University of Washington in Seattle instead stepping in to portray the college in the majority of outside shots. The new backdrop is much closer to the show’s Los Angeles hub and, therefore, a far more convenient filming site. To help sell the swap, establishing shots of Vassar are peppered throughout each episode.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of Chas Demster, It’s Filmed There While the campus scenery was shifted, the Theta house, where the girls regularly party, has remained a staple, appearing extensively throughout both seasons.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The structure was thoroughly overhauled by season one production designer Susie Mancini for the role. Preceding its appearance on “Sex Lives,” the home’s main façade had a far more traditional feel, marked by muted brick and white clapboard siding (as seen above). But current visitors to Midwest Street via the Warner Bros. Studio Tour will find it bearing a decidedly collegiate, Craftsman-esque aesthetic, enveloped in dark wood and deep red brick cladding. While the reimagining was significant, the dwelling’s framework remains largely untouched from its prior state, with the positioning of the front porch, lower-level bay window and second-story windows and gable left intact.
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Image Credit: HBO Max The Theta house is a practical set, meaning that it is not just an empty shell, but that its inside is built out and can also be employed for filming. “Sex Lives” uses the main level regularly, with many scenes shot in the living room and entrance foyer. The basement area, though, where parties like the Thetalympics take place, as well as the fraternity bedrooms, are soundstage-built sets that can be found elsewhere on the lot. For shoots at the house, Mancini and season two production designer Angelique Clark dress the space with the typical trappings of fraternity life, including framed photos of past members, mismatched furnishings and an array of rugs and lamps.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The structure’s north side is also regularly featured on “Sex Lives” as the Thetas’ backyard, though heavily embellished with the addition of a perimeter fence, patio furniture and a plethora of twinkle lights.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt According to “Warner Bros.: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot,” the Theta house and surrounding town were initially built for 1939’s “Four Wives,” the sequel to the 1938 hit “Four Daughters.” Bingen details, “This new set, originally called ‘Mid-West Street’ or ‘New Midvale Street,’ cost an estimated $40,000. A press release at the time trumpeted that ‘outstanding among the sets constructed for “Four Wives” was a 23-home Midwest town residential section covering two and a half acres and including a park.’ The mention of ’23 homes’ was a rather impudent exaggeration. There were originally eight houses in the district. Six of them, or their equivalents, are still there today.” Sadly, that number has since dwindled, with only four homes currently remaining. Two were demolished to make way for the studio’s Stage 48: Script to Screen tour experience, which opened to the public in 2015.
All of the residences on the street were built with multiple façades, each bearing a different look, to maximize filming potential. (That’s the southern side of the Theta house pictured above.) As such, the structures are some of the most oft-used locales on the entire Warner Bros. lot, sometimes pulling double and triple duty, posing as multiple places in the same production.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Other Theta house cameos include the beloved 1962 musical “The Music Man,” in which Mayor George Shinn (Paul Ford) and his wife, Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn (Hermione Gingold), walk by the residence while discussing Professor Harold Hill (Robert Preston) mid-film.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates) calls the place home in the 1984 horror-comedy classic “Gremlins.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television It pops up as the supposed Middletown, N.Y. residence of Phoebe Buffay’s (Lisa Kudrow) absentee father in a handful of episodes of “Friends,” including season two’s “The One with the Bullies,” in which she first meets her brother, Frank Buffay Jr. (Giovanni Ribisi).
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television The structure’s interior and exterior appear regularly as the house belonging to Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale) and her family on the popular Freeform drama “Pretty Little Liars.” It is on the site’s north side that Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario) digs through the trash looking for her friend’s discarded anti-anxiety medication in the season six episode “Don’t Look Now.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television But it is “Gilmore Girls” that has gotten the most use out of the place! As painstakingly chronicled on the It’s Filmed There website, the Theta house is featured myriad times on the beloved series, most frequently portraying Stars Hollow’s local Black & White & Read Bookstore.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television The show utilized virtually every angle of the structure throughout its seven-year run, with the north side posing as the residence where Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy) and Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) are hired to cater a “Lord of the Rings” themed birthday party in season four’s “The Hobbit, the Sofa And Digger Stiles.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television Captured from a different angle, the north façade also plays the home belonging to Anna Nardini (Sherilyn Fenn), where Luke Danes (Scott Patterson) heads in season seven’s “Knit, People, Knit.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television And the interior, thoroughly outfitted with floral wallpaper and furnishings, masquerades as The Cheshire Cat Bed & Breakfast, where Lorelai and Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) stay in season two’s “The Road Trip to Harvard.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Theta house even makes an appearance in Netflix’s 2016 revival, “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” once again popping up as the Black & White & Read Bookstore, where Lorelai and Luke attend a showing of “Eraserhead” in the episode titled “Spring.”