Wherefore the Sirens?

Browsing Netflix offerings recently, we noticed a limited series called Sirens. The title alone lured us in (as it were), since I am an honorary member of a whaleboat rowing team called the Sirenes. Honorary member means that I often fill in as a substitute on this all-women's team so that they have a full boat. Sometimes I even get to race with them. 

In any case, the title and vaguely nautical vibes were enough to get us watching. It was a vague echo of the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Perfect Couple, a 2024 Netflix production that was set on Nantucket. Although we have not been there recently, this is a favorite haunt of ours, the only place in the United States that is an island, a county, and a town.

This show that clearly intended to depict Nantucket,  Characters came and went by ferry. One of them had a 17-hour trip from Buffalo. There were a lot of rich, white people and gray houses with white trim. A cute little downtown with big mansions a short drive away. Eventually, a neighborhood and a gulf course on Nantucket were named. But the writers and directors worked very hard not to mention it directly.

We were well into the series when Pam's keen eye caught a sign on the side of shop in said cute little town (creatively dubbed Harbor Town), and on the sign was carved its purported latitude and longitude. 

I took this photo of the screen -- both because the image was fleeting and the resolution low -- and went right to Google Maps. Incidentally, I was glad to see the degree-minutes-seconds format, which said Google Maps is making increasingly rare, and I note that even if correct, it is far more precise than accurate. By that I mean that four decimal places in the expression of a second of latitude or longitude equates to about 1/8 of an inch, which is smaller than the decimal point in use. 

Anyway, enough of the suspense. These coordinates are a bit out to sea, almost as far from Nantucket as the island is wide. But it is clearly the nearest landmass, so the carving was clearly intentional.

We are reminded of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the latitude and longitude of Grover's Corners describes a point in the Atlantic close to New Hampshire but not in any real state.

As for the filming location of Sirens, IMDb indicates that it is North Fork, New York. That is, the North Fork of the eastern end of Long Island. It has a cultural geography and vernacular landscape similar to Nantucket. The physical landscape is also similar, given that both are terminal moraines formed by side by side at the end of the last ice age and later surrounded by rising ocean as the glaciers that formed them continued to melt.