Ben Garvin / The New York TimesA setting in a real location outside the tired “New York or Los Angeles” duopoly can help a TV series stand out — a lesson some shows making their debuts in the 2014 season have embraced. Here, a statue of Mary Richards, a character in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” was erected in downtown Minneapolis in 2006.

A few weeks ago, when the New York Yankees were on the road playing the Baltimore Orioles, Yankee pitcher Brandon McCarthy made this wisecrack via Twitter:

“forgetting to pack my wearable ‘NO, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE WIRE’ sandwich board before coming to Baltimore has proven to be disastrous.”

For better or worse, some towns and cities end up being defined by their presence in a television show. Baltimore is a case in point, at least for fans of the HBO series “The Wire,” which was set there.

Television tends to be lazy when it comes to locating shows. Plenty, of course, are set in fictional places, including the forthcoming Fox shows “Gracepoint,” which takes place in a nonexistent California coastal community, and “Wayward Pines,” named for a made-up Idaho town. A wearying number of other series take place in New York or Los Angeles. So when a setting comes along that is not New York, not Los Angeles and yet real, it can help a series stand out.

Whether that’s a good thing for the town involved is another matter. “Reckless,” a CBS legal thriller-melodrama hybrid full of tawdry goings-on, has not exactly improved the image of Charleston, South Carolina, where it is set. “Topless Prophet,” a Cinemax reality show about so-called gentlemen’s clubs in Detroit, is not doing that beleaguered city any favors.

“The Wire” wasn’t the most flattering portrait of Baltimore either, but the series developed such cachet that some of it rubbed off on the city despite the drug dealing and dysfunction depicted.

Reality-TV towns can jump on a bandwagon, too. On the home page of the Monroe-West Monroe, Louisiana, Convention and Visitors Bureau website, the first thing you see is a picture of the Robertson family of “Duck Dynasty.” Springfield, Oregon, where creator Matt Groening said in 2012 the Springfield from “The Simpsons” is set, just added a Simpsons mural to its arts center.

So here is a frivolous look at some less-than-familiar locales we’ll be visiting in the coming months. Will the exposure generate the kind of interest that results in T-shirts and bus tours? Only time and ratings will tell:

Seattle

Television has been drawn periodically to Seattle for a while: The old series “Here Come the Brides,” about loggers and their womenfolk just after the Civil War, was set there. More recent shows include the sitcom “Frasier” and the current Netflix drama “The Killing.” Now a reality show and a company that produces what the city may be best known for are hoping to cash in: “Grounded in Seattle” is coming to We TV beginning Oct. 11. According to an announcement from the Barista Coffee Co., the series will be a “brutally honest look into the lives behind the scenes of girls from a variety of backgrounds” who work as costumed baristas in the company’s coffee stands. It will also apparently be a brutally honest version of product placement.

Jasper, Alabama

Syfy has built a roster of quite good scripted shows, but on Oct. 7, it tries what sounds like an amusing twist on a workplace reality show: “Town of the Living Dead,” a series about the making of a zombie movie. The show is to chronicle efforts of a few amateur filmmakers in Jasper, near Birmingham, to complete “Thr33 Days Dead,” which they are said to have been working on for six years. Hey, the film must be real: It has a Twitter account and a trailer (which looks terrible).

Boston

The city has, of course, been the setting for other shows — ever hear of a sitcom called “Cheers”? — but the attempts at a Boston accent have rarely been as grating as they are on the “The McCarthys,” a CBS comedy to make its debut Oct. 30. The repartee, though, is pretty good as chatty family members meddle in one another’s lives. Laurie Metcalf makes a dandy matriarch.

Modesto, California

This city is the setting for a midseason ABC series called “American Crime” that is likely to generate attention, with Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton among the stars. The story, the show’s website says, involves an attack on a white couple and resulting racial tensions, and some locals have not been thrilled.

“It’s a sensationalistic, inaccurate media portrayal of fictitious crime in our community that exploits victims of crime and our community,” the Stanislaus County sheriff, Adam Christianson, told The Modesto Bee.

Battle Creek, Michigan

Behind-the-scenes names attached to the CBS police drama “Battle Creek,” expected midseason, include Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad,” and David Shore, whose credits include “House.” An FBI agent (Josh Duhamel) is dispatched to set up a satellite office in Battle Creek, where he ends up in a buddy-cop partnership with a reluctant detective (Dean Winters). The interagency tensions are familiar but allayed with touches of humor.