Golden Globe-Winning ‘Girls’ Spawns Brooklyn Bus Tour

By Mark Johanson | January 14 2013 4:50 PM

You can debate the respective merits of HBO’s new gal-pal comedy “Girls” and its venerable predecessor “Sex and the City” all you want, but in addition to sharing the same city, network, and collection of Golden Globes, the two shows will soon have something else in common: A dedicated bus tour.

Reuters

HBO's "Girls" is on a roll. It just started its second season, won two Golden Globes and now it's getting its very own New York City bus tour.

Sponsorship Link

On Location Tours’ “Sex and the City” bus has rolled through New York since 2001, carting devoted fans from Midtown Manhattan to the Meatpacking District and Greenwich Village following in the footsteps of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. Indeed, the bus tour became so popular in the mid-2000s that the company ran it seven days per week, two times a day over a period of several years.

Now, On Location Tours has a new idea: Take New York visitors deep into the bowels of Brooklyn to all of the hipster hangouts frequented by the girls of “Girls” (i.e. Greenpoint’s Cafe Grumpy where Hannah “works,” Adam’s Prospect Heights apartment and the abandoned warehouse in Bushwick where Shoshanna accidentally smoked crack).

The company, which also offers tours to “The Sopranos” and “Gossip Girl” sites in addition to more general film and TV tours, said it’s in the early process of planning the “Girls” tour.

“We’re watching the second season closely and rewatching the first season on DVD to get a handle on all of the locations,” Georgette Blau, who founded On Location Tours in 1999, said.

Blau thinks the love-it-or-hate-it show is “hugely popular” with the type of audience that would be interested in going on this type of tour: girls. Indeed, some 80 percent of people that use On Location Tours are female, and 90 percent are tourists.

Golden Globe wins Sunday night for both the show and its lead actress, Lena Dunham (who also writes, produces and directs), give it even further momentum, and Blau said the company hopes to have all of the routing, hiring of guides and a script drafted by the time the third season (assuming there is one) premieres.

“The first season was wonderful, but there weren’t that many locations,” Blau lamented. She hopes season two will offer up enough memorable spots to put together an itinerary of recognizable locations that people will be able to connect with.

On Location Tours had planned a “Law & Order” tour once upon a time but ultimately decided that the show never offered enough interesting locations to make it viable. Blau, however, is confident that the company will make something work for HBO’s new Brooklyn-based hit.