Useful Notes / Atlanta

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"Do you remember how Atlanta was way more relevant back before the 1996 Olympics? I do. That ended pretty quickly."

— George Weidman on System Shock's "New Atlanta"

Atlanta is both the largest-populated city and the state capital of Georgia, and the largest metropolitan area in the Deep South^note If you don't consider Texas Southern that is. If you do, Houston is the largest Southern city, and Dallas–Fort Worth is its largest metropolitan area, best known for being the current center of the Hip-Hop world. The Coca-Cola Company (Pepsi is North Carolina blasphemy)^note Coca-Cola's influence is in fact so large that "Coke" has become the generic term for soft drinks in much of the South; ironically, however, Pepsi actually outsold Coca-Cola during the 1996 Olympics mentioned in the page quote. Bear in mind this is not something to bring up to an Atlanta local in polite company., Delta Air Lines, Chick-fil-A, and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have headquarters here. Turner Broadcasting (which owns CNN, Cartoon Network, TBS and TNT) is also based there (having grown out of an independent TV station on channel 17). Atlanta can roughly be divided to areas within and outside Interstate 285, a beltway highway that is known for insane traffic and referred to by locals as "The Perimeter". Atlanta also has the busiest airport in the world and if you have flown in or through the US more than a couple of times, you will have had a layover there at least once.

Atlanta has at least seventeen streets named with variations on Peachtree^note Many European plants not normally thought of as aggressive went berserk when introduced to the Americas. Much of the Deep South was overrun by peach trees; Argentina was smothered by feral spinach. (For a twentieth-century repeat of this story, see... that.) As for the frequency of streets name "Peachtree" in Atlanta, there is an oft-repeated story that at one point there was an ordinance forbidding Blacks from owning property on "Peachtree Street"—i.e. the one downtown—and that Whites renamed several unrelated streets "Peachtree" to take advantage of this; it's not clear if this is actually true, but it would surprise nobody if it were.. The city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, in which East African marathon runners collapsed with heatstroke.^note  Actually not that surprising once you realize that most elite East African runners grew up in high-altitude regions with temperatures considerably cooler than Atlanta summers. For example, the highest temperature ever recorded in the Kenyan city of Eldoret, home to many of that country's greatest runners (lowest elevation 7100 ft/2100 m), is 87.1 °F/30.5 °C—which is slightly cooler than Atlanta's average summer high. Typical highs in Eldoret are closer to 75°F/24 °C, a touch warmer than Atlanta's typical summer lows, and typical lows in Eldoret drop below 50 °F/10 °C. The city infamously listed Olive Garden as the best Italian restaurant in the city in the guidebooks for said Olympics. Right by Centennial Park is the Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest indoor one. Due to its location in the South, Atlanta rarely receives snow and is famous for (from an outsider's perspective) overreacting to even hints of incoming snow; two inches^note ~5 cm of snow in January 2014 led to the whole city shutting down for nearly a week, epic traffic jams resulting in many people stuck in traffic for 24 hours, and several deaths.^note The actual circumstances behind what came to be known as the "Snowpocalypse" was actually a unique set of incidents that likely would have overwhelmed any Southern city unused to snow: The snowfall began early in the week, during the busiest part of the day, and came down abnormally heavy in a very short amount of time, essentially overwhelming the public services of a city that typically only deals with light flurries and the occasional overnight heavy snowfall. This not only caused heavy traffic jams on literally every major highway running into, out of, or around Atlanta, but also meant that the plow and salt trucks were more or less stuck right there with the traffic, and public infrastructure ground to a halt. The snow then stopped for two or three days, with temperatures rising just enough to cause the snow to begin melting, and traffic began to clear a little bit...and then the temperatures plunged and it snowed again, causing the snow to mix with the melted ice and refreeze. This created, essentially, a sheet of ice over everything, including the roadways and vehicles stuck on the roadways. With the roads impassible to all but only the sturdiest offroad vehicles (it should be noted that, with the exception of public service vehicles, tire chains are illegal in Georgia), infrastructure nonexistent, and public services vastly overwhelmed, it was an apocalyptic, worst-case scenario for the city.

Hometown of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and was nicknamed "the city too busy to hate." It also prides itself on being the epitome of the "New South," with modern architecture and industry. Atlanta can be used as a "But Not Too Southern" setting, a good choice for artists who want a story in the South without using the tropes of the Deep South or Sweet Home Alabama.

It was originally founded in 1837 as the end-point of a railroad line to Chattanooga, for passengers and freight to be transferred from that rail line to a train to Savannah. This intended function was reflected in the city's original name: Terminus, a name with which an early-to-mid 1990s street-traffic-control software system (home-grown by Georgia Tech's computer-science department) was christened as an abbreviation for Traffic Event Response & Management for Intelligent Navigation Using Signals, which at the time was considered state-of-the-art, that adjusted traffic-light timing on-the-fly to adapt to fluctuations in traffic congestion on Atlanta's streets, developed explicitly as part of preparations for hosting the 1994 Super Bowl and the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. It worked better than expected.^note Transportation department officials could feed in a tentative pre-scheduled set of signal-timings based on events that would probably cause congestion such as a sports-game predicted to have high attendance. If that game got cancelled, the Terminus software system would detect the lack of congestion, and correct the traffic-light timings to what they would have been set to in the absence of the predicted traffic-jam.

The city's official crest portrays a phoenix, in reference to being the only city in the United States to have been completely destroyed by war, and referencing the manner in which it was destroyed: burned during General Sherman's "March to the Sea" (safety advice: be very careful about broaching this subject with the locals, lest you incur their wrath; politics notwithstanding, the destruction of Atlanta is still a sore subject even today). The phoenix also neatly symbolizes the city's return to prominence after the war.

The reason that Sherman's wrath descended on Atlanta is that, during the war, the city was the South's most strategic railway junction. Three rail lines (basically tracing the same lines as today's Interstate highways running through the city, see below) made it possible to move troops and supplies to pretty much anywhere in the Confederacy east of the Mississippi that was reachable by railway. In one particularly striking instance of Atlanta's importance, General James Longstreet's entire corps was routed through Atlanta in September 1863 as an emergency reinforcement to the Confederate Army of Tennessee, playing a key role in the South's victory at Chickamauga (at the northern end of Georgia, a few miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee). Recognizing the strategic importance of Atlanta to the Confederate war effort, Sherman made it the primary target of his spring-summer 1864 campaign. The Confederates were just as aware of how important Atlanta was, and fought fiercely all the way down from the Tennessee border to the city itself, finally being forced to evacuate Atlanta after a string of bloody battles around the city and a siege lasting two months. The Battle of Atlanta (actually fought near Decatur to the east of the city), on July 22, 1864, one of the biggest engagements of the campaign, is commemorated in the Atlanta Cyclorama, which was at one time the world's largest painting.

Rappers call it the ATL, after the airport code for the busiest airport in the world. Said airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, is city owned, and the city is not allowed to make any profit off its operation.^note  The airport briefly lost its "world's busiest airport" title in 2020 to Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in Guangzhou, China due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but quickly regained it the following year as shutdowns and travel restrictions eased In addition to being the busiest airport, it is the home base and largest hub of Delta Air Lines, whose presence at Hartsfield-Jackson constitutes the largest single airline operation of any airport in the world.^note That doesn't even include Delta Connection flights operated by regional partners, the bulk of which is handled by Expressjet Airlines. ATL also is a major focus city for Southwest, inherited from their recent merger with AirTran who maintained their principal hub there. It seems like a joke when discussion about the city inevitably leads to the airport, but the scope of the operation there is really unlike anything else. This is especially due to the disproportionate amount of connecting traffic it handles (i.e. passengers just passing through who aren't actually originating or arriving there). Other cities with similar megahubs such as Chicago-O'Hare and Dallas-Fort Worth have much larger amounts of local passengers. An old joke in the South says that when you die, it doesn't matter whether your soul is destined for Heaven or Hell, no matter where you're assigned for the afterlife, the connecting flight will inevitably have a two-hour layover in Atlanta. This joke is also considered common knowledge among airline pilots and flight-attendants in the 'States, and anyone who has worked in a travel-agency, or members of travel-agents' families are also likely to be somewhat familiar with the joke. Seriously, if you tell this joke to any flight-attendant working in the United States, they're almost guaranteed to laugh, or at least chuckle and give a little nod. Atlanta has always been a key transportation hub; as explained above, it was one of the most strategic locations in the South during the American Civil War because of the railway lines that met there. Today, three Interstate Highways, numbers I-20 (running west-east), I-75 (northwest-southeast) and I-85 (northeast-southwest), meet each other at Atlanta, connecting the heartland of the Southeast with the Midwest and the East Coast and Northeast, and making the city one of the most important hubs in the Interstate network (which also helps explain why traffic on the Perimeter is so awful). An underrated aspect of Hartsfield-Jackson is its people mover, dubbed "The Plane Train", which has quietly become one of the most efficient public transportation systems in the country, transporting an average of 250,000 people a day. The Plane Train is also known for its memorable voiceover announcements provided by a rotating selection of local voice talent, which any seasoned traveler knows by heart.

When Delta faced economic troubles starting with the 2002 recession and ending with its 2008 exit from bankruptcy, the state government looked for ways to diversify the economy. ^note  Ironically enough, Atlanta was wasn't hit as hard by the economic collapse in 2007/2008 as it was from the earlier They decided on trying to boost film production and signed the first incentives program in 2002 as an experiment before substantially beefing it up due to its success in 2008. Georgia passed California as the top state for film and television in 2016 and in 2018 was second in feature film productions behind Canada. The state, in particular, is a favorite filming location of the world's current most popular film franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most of the films since the 2014 production of Ant-Man have been filmed at Pinewood Studios in the Atlanta area. Also filmed around Atlanta is the Netflix smash hit Stranger Things, which was actually rewritten to be set in Indiana rather than Montauk, New York because suburban Atlanta looks more like the Midwest than Long Island, but the setting had to be Northern for a variety of reasons (ranging from casting to the desire to avoid the South's built-in horror tropes).

Many old-fashioned Southerners and inhabitants of Georgia's quieter, less urban regions detest Atlanta. The city is an upstart by Southern metropolis standards, founded in 1837 and incorporated ten years later. Its perceived cultural blandness, liberal politics ^note It's the unofficial "Gay Mecca" of the South and one of the largest black-majority cities in the US, with a large and healthy black middle- and upper-class., incessant self-promotion, and seemingly undeserved prosperity grate on Southern sensibilities. This actually has a fitting analogy: Georgia is the so-called "Empire State of the South"... and Atlanta bears the same relation to the rest of Georgia that New York City bears to the rest of the Empire State. In fact, one common joke is that Georgia is two states: Metro Atlanta and everywhere else.

Atlanta is based around the I-285, a circular highway interstate locally nicknamed "the Perimeter". Located inside the Perimeter is the city proper, dubbed the ITP, and outside the Perimeter lies Atlanta's many suburbs and neighboring cities, dubbed the OTP. How much of the greater metropolitan area counts as being part of Atlanta is a matter of fierce debate amongst locals: while suburbs just to the north of the Perimeter like Sandy Springs or Marietta are agreed to count, areas further OTP like McDonough or Gainesville are up for debate.

Atlanta is home to several major professional sports teams; however, the poor performances of its pro sports teams, with only three championships among its major teams in over a half-century, as well as the transient nature of the metro area's residents has given the city a reputation as a bad sports town:

• The Braves are a Major League Baseball team that started in Boston, moved to Milwaukee, and finally ended up in Atlanta in 1966. They've won four World Series, two in their former home cities (1914 and 1957 in Boston and Milwaukee respectively) and two in Atlanta (1995 and 2021). Its players have included Hank Aaron who was the Home Run Champion to top Babe Ruth, and it was formerly owned by Ted Turner, and as such had most of their games broadcast on cable station TBS from 1973 to 2007. They did very well and were popular enough in the 1990s to be nicknamed "America's Team"^note pushed heavily by TBS, but anyone outside the Metro Atlanta area who called them that was doing so ironically, but entered a slump in the 2000s. Even during their long streak of Division pennants, they were the poster child for Every Year They Fizzle Out, netting one World Series win in 14 playoff appearances. In 2010, longtime manager^*(for those of you not familiar with baseball terminology, a professional team's head coach is titled "manager") Bobby Cox, known for being A Father to His Men (and being one of the most ejected managers in MLB) retired. In 2017, the Braves opened a new ballpark in suburban Cobb County, Truist Park.
• The Falcons are an NFL team, historically mediocre with occasional strong seasons, and appearances in Super Bowls XXXIII and LI. It was the team quarterback Michael Vick played for when he was exposed for running dog fights. From 2008 to 2012, the Falcons were one of the NFL's more solid teams despite a lack of postseason success. Super Bowl LI will be a game that lives in infamy for the Falcons after the Patriots erased a 25-point deficit in the fourth quarter to put the Super Bowl into overtime for the first time in its history, with the Patriots scoring the winning touchdown on their first (and the only) overtime possession.
• The Hawks are an NBA team that have a logo that looks suspiciously like Pac-Man. Another middle-of-the-pack team, also owned by Ted Turner for a few years. Their most notable player in recent history was Dominique Wilkins, nine-time All-Star, two-time Slam Dunk champion, and often cast as one of Michael Jordan's Worthy Opponents.
• The Dream are a WNBA team founded in 2008; in their first season, they made a heroic effort to be the worst team in the history of ever, finishing 4-30. They got better. The Dream shared a home with the Hawks for most of their existence; however, the WNBA team moved to a smaller arena in suburban College Park, sharing the venue with the Hawks' G League affiliate, the College Park Skyhawks.
• Atlanta had two different NHL teams, both of which ultimately left for Canada. Most hockey fans believe that both the Flames and Thrashers had failed due to a lack of fan support; a common joke among hockey fans is that any new Canadian NHL team has to start in Atlanta. Many Atlanta hockey fans, however, reject the common "Atlanta doesn't support hockey" narrative as flawed and shallow, claiming that the city was never given a fair chance in either case. Those who have insider knowledge state that the Flames' and Thrashers' on-ice performance and attendance issues were symptoms and not the root cause behind the two teams' failures, citing the Flames' economic issues and the Thrashers' dysfunctional ownership.
  • The Flames^note an allusion to Sherman's burning of Atlanta, founded in 1972, enjoyed modest success on the ice but had a bad reputation of Every Year They Fizzle Out come the Stanley Cup playoffs. The economic recession of the early 1970s as well as ballooning player salaries caused by the bidding war between the NHL and the World Hockey Association^note The Flames, along with the New York Islanders, were hastily established by the NHL to keep the upstart WHA out of the then-newly built Omni Coliseum and Nassau Coliseum. caused many of the expansion NHL and WHA teams to struggle financially, and the Flames were no exception. In Atlanta specifically, Flames' owner Tom Cousins had most of his wealth tied to the local real estate market, and its downturn exacerbated his losses on the team; after efforts to find local ownership failed, Cousins sold the Flames to a Calgary-based group led by Nelson Skalbania in 1980 to avert bankruptcy.
  • The Thrashers^note named after the state bird; the nickname had also been considered for both the Flames and the NFL's Falcons, a 1999 expansion team, struggled both on and off the ice; in their 11 seasons of play, the Thrashers finished dead last in the league twice within their first three seasons and made the Stanley Cup playoffs only once, getting swept by the New York Rangers in Round One in that lone appearance in 2007. The Thrashers had ownership troubles since their inception; Ted Turner made the original bid for NHL expansion, but in 1996, his media empire was acquired by Time Warner, and Time Warner themselves were subsequently acquired by AOL in 2001. In 2004, Time Warner, looking to recoup losses from the disastrous AOL merger, divested Turner's sports interests, selling the Thrashers, Hawks, and operating rights to State Farm (née Philips) Arena to a group called Atlanta Spirit. The group was notorious for its internal legal discord as well as neglecting the Thrashers in favor of the Hawks; Atlanta Spirit didn't even want the Thrashers as a tenant at Philips Arena, much less operate the hockey club themselves. The group had claimed that they had lost over $130 million operating the Thrashers; however, most Thrashers fans believe that group had intentionally sabotaged the team by running them on a shoestring budget. After settling legal disputes with an ex-partner in late 2010, the group sold the Thrashers to True North Sports and Entertainment in the 2011 off-season, who relocated the team to Winnipeg and renamed them the Jets. Atlanta Spirit allegedly refused offers from any parties looking to keep the Thrashers in Atlanta, as the group wanted to maintain control of the Hawks and operations to Philips Arena. While there are still (mostly older) fans of the Flames in Atlanta despite their move to Alberta over four decades ago, the Jets receive absolutely no love from many Atlanta hockey fans.^note True North initially planned to acquire the Arizona Coyotes, who went bankrupt in 2009 and at the time, was under league control, to bring the original Jets franchise back to Winnipeg; however, the NHL was adamant that the Coyotes remain in Arizona, and the city of Glendale, Arizona elected to cover the Coyotes' losses. Not long after shipping the Thrashers off to Winnipeg, Atlanta Spirit looked to sell a majority stake of the Hawks and arena operations, eventually selling to a group led by Tony Ressler in 2015. While nearly all Thrashers fans blame Atlanta Spirit for the team's demise, a few also criticize the NHL's front office for seemingly violating the league's bylaws, making no good faith efforts to keep the Thrashers in Atlanta, as they have done for practically every other struggling franchise threatening to relocate. While many Thrashers fans were not necessarily against the Coyotes staying in Arizona or even the return of an NHL team to Winnipeg (at least before True North came knocking on the Thrashers' door), most argue that the wrong team moved to Winnipeg in 2011, as the Coyotes had remained under the perennial threat of relocation, coming to a head in 2022, after the team was evicted from their arena in Glendale and moved to a smaller venue on the campus of Arizona State, and the team's hockey assets was subsequently sold and transferred to Utah in 2024. Unlike the Thrashers, the Coyotes are considered a "suspended" franchise while the Utah Mammoth are considered an expansion franchise founded in 2024, similar to the NFL's Baltimore Ravens, when then-Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell controversially moved the original Browns franchise to Baltimore in 1996, in which a settlement with the city of Cleveland required that the Browns' legacy stay in Ohio.
  • While many hockey traditionalists would rather see the NHL permanently write off Atlanta as a lost cause, many former Thrashers fans argue that the Atlanta market is too large for the league to ignore and believe that an NHL team can succeed in the Peach State under the right ownership, pointing to recent successes in other non-traditional markets. As of March 2024, there are two competing proposals to bring an NHL franchise back to the Atlanta metro area, both of which are planned to be based in or near Alpharetta, 25 miles north of downtown Atlanta. One proposal, led by businessman Vernon Krause, is the Gathering at South Forsyth, which is planned to be built on an undeveloped tract near the Forsyth–Fulton County line. The other proposal is a redevelopment of the North Point Mall site, led by former NHL player Anson Carter, who moved to the Atlanta metro area after retiring. The Atlanta Gladiators of the minor league ECHL, of which Carter owns a minority stake, has been based in Duluth since 2003, making them the longest continuously operating pro hockey team in not only metro Atlanta, but the entire state. Since 2022, the Gladiators have held an annual Thrashers night, being one of the team's most popular promotions, implying that if/when the NHL returns to Atlanta, the Thrashers would be the likely frontrunner for the team name, despite the troubled history of the previous incarnation.
• Atlanta United FC is probably the exception to the rule. They began play in Major League Soccer in 2017. The team is owned by Falcons owner and Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank and shares the Falcons' stadium. They won the MLS Cup playoffs in their sophomore season, broke attendance records several times over, and were the most valuable soccer team in the United States until being surpassed in the mid-2020s by the league's two Los Angeles teams and Inter Miami.^note Inter's value skyrocketed after it signed Argentine legend Lionel Messi in 2023. In September 2023, the United States Soccer Federation announced its intentions of moving its headquarters from Chicago to Atlanta, ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
• The city will get an as-yet-unnamed team in the National Women's Soccer League, the more established of the two current US top-level leagues in that sphere, in 2028. The NWSL team is the de facto successor to two incarnations of the defunct Atlanta Beat, the first of which played in the equally defunct Women's United Soccer Association and the second in the also defunct Women's Professional Soccer. The new team is also owned by Blank and will play in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
• Henry County to the south of the city is the home of Atlanta Motor Speedway, a legacy NASCAR track.

While Atlanta may have bad luck with its professional sports teams, the city is often considered the de facto capital of college football. The College Football Hall of Fame is located in Atlanta, across the street from Centennial Olympic Park. Atlanta is home to the SEC Championship Game, having been played there since 1994^note the first two editions were played in Birmingham, Alabama's Legion Field, and the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, one of the "New Year's Six" bowl games and every three years host to one of the two College Football Playoff semifinal games; during the Bowl Championship Series era, the Peach Bowl was one of the highest attended and highest paying non-BCS bowl games. Atlanta also hosts the annual Celebration Bowl, the de facto national championship among historically black colleges and universities in Division I football. The Metro Atlanta area is home to two FBS schools; the highly prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology (aka Georgia Tech) in midtown play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, while Georgia State University in downtown play in the Sun Belt. Additionally, there is Kennesaw State University just outside the Cobb County city of that name, who made the FCS-FBS transition in 2024 when it joined Conference USA and won that league's title in 2025. However, the most popular college football program among Atlantans doesn't call the city home—that honor goes to the University of Georgia, located 70 miles northeast in Athens and playing in the SEC.

Those with more geeky inclinations can easily find a place in Atlanta. Downtown is overtaken every Labor Day weekend by the massive celebration of all things geek known as Dragon Con. MomoCon^note  "Momo" being the Japanese word for peach, and, as mentioned above, Georgia is known as the "Peach State" is a newer but fast-growing multi-genre con which takes place around the Memorial Day weekend. MomoCon was originally held at Georgia Tech's Student Center, hosted by the Institute's anime club and offered free attendance, with merchandise sales raising funds for future events; however, increasing attendance as well as its associated rising costs forced the con to start charging a membership fee and move to larger spaces, eventually moving to the Georgia World Congress Center in 2015. While both Dragon Con and MomoCon are mostly similar in terms of featured guests and events, the former skews older and focuses more on sci-fi and fantasy while the latter is more anime-focused and skews towards a younger audience.^note There are several other annual cons held in the Atlanta Metro area, including GAFilk in January, Furry Weekend Atlanta in May, and FrolicCon on Easter weekend, which is, somewhat bizarrely, a combination SF&F/BDSM convention. And the weirdness central that is [adult swim] (and the anime/action animation central that is Toonami) originates from an old Turner Broadcasting facility on Williams Street ^note this is why Adult Swim programming is produced by Williams Street Studios; the Interstate divides it from the Techwood campus that most of the other Turner nets are based at; the "Turner mansion" (as seen in the 1990s on Turner-released home videos and movies) is the central part of that complex.

Another point of note for Atlanta is Waffle House, a chain of diner-style restaurants headquartered in Norcross, located northeast of the city. Waffle House contains almost five hundred locations in Georgia alone and is considered an Atlanta staple, having achieved three points of infamy online: being open 24/7 (local urban legend says that no Waffle House location has locks on their doors), the many viral Internet videos of fights breaking out in either the restaurants or their parking lots, and for having a emergency disaster response initiative that's so effective that FEMA unofficially uses restaurant activity to measure the severity of a natural disaster.

Atlanta in fiction:

• ATL
• ATL: Stories from the Retrofuture
• Atlanta, entirely shot there
• Atlanta Nights
• Baby Driver
• The Change-Up starring Ryan Reynolds.
• The 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has Violet Beauregarde from Atlanta. Given Violet’s character being updated to be a cocky sports prodigy rather than merely a gum enthusiast, it’s possible they chose Atlanta in reference to the 1996 Olympics. Ironically, AnnaSophia Robb is originally from Denver, which serves as the hometown of Mike Teavee. Meanwhile, the children’s play adaptation Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka has Violet come from Snellville, a suburb in Gwinnett County.
• Class of 3000
• Constantine: Constantine's hideout in the TV series is set in an old millhouse in the rural outskirts of Metro Atlanta.
• Most the main characters in Deliverance are Atlanta yuppies, and a major theme is their culture shock at camping out in the rural Georgia wilderness, especially after they are attacked by rednecks.
• Designing Women
• The Devil's Panties
• Driving Miss Daisy
• The Dukes of Hazzard occasionally uses it as a setting, and the first five episodes were filmed in the area.
• Dynasty (2017): The reboot of the '80s show moves the setting from Denver to Atlanta.
• Farewell to Nostradamus: About a group of thieves trying to steal a book containing lost prophecies written by Nostradamus from the fictional Earth Building located in Atlanta.
• Fled
• Futurama, "The Deep South": Atlanta was relocated to the middle of the ocean and sank, becoming a stand-in for Atlantis.
• Game Night is set in and was shot entirely in the upper-middle-class Atlanta suburbs.
• The General (1926), is based on the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862 that started in what is now Kennesaw, just north of Atlanta.
• G.I. Joe: Scarlett is a big Shout-Out to Gone with the Wind, as (barring the movies where she hails from Canada), she hails from Atlanta (and part of the finale of G.I. Joe: Renegades takes place in it) and in addition to having "Scarlett" as a codename, her real last name is O'Hara.
• Gold Digger (Antarctic Press): The Diggers family lives in Decatur County, a suburban area of Atlanta, creator Fred Perry's hometown.
• Gone with the Wind — not only is the Burning of Atlanta included in the second act, but Margaret Mitchell was born and died in Atlanta, hit by a car on Peachtree Street. Not only that, but Ted Turner, based in the area, eventually came to own the film (via his 1986 acquisition of the MGM library)
• The Kate Daniels novel series is set in Atlanta that's been overrun and partly destroyed by magic.
• Though it doesn't pass through Atlanta proper, Left 4 Dead 2 begins in Savannah and the Survivors pass through the state on their way to New Orleans.
• Life as We Know It starring Katherine Heigl.
• A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe.
• Matlock
• Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition. The second part of the game takes place in Atlanta. Several landmarks can be seen while driving around.
• Profiler
• The Queer Eye (2018) reboot takes place here.
• Raising Dion. Also shot there.
• Sabotage (2014)
• ''Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda and its film adaptation, Love, Simon.
• Single Ladies, a VH1 show produced by Queen Latifah which can be considered Sex and the City IN ATLANTA! And not white-washed!
• Triple 9
• Most of Tyler Perry's movies take place in Atlanta.
• The Walking Dead, both comic book and TV show, started out next to Atlanta, although they moved away fairly quickly.
• The Zoë Martinique series of novels takes place in Atlanta.

Shows based in Atlanta:

• The internet comedy group Dormtainment live in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, in fact at least two of their videos require you to have some knowledge of the Atlanta area to get it (though you could probably figure it out): "Straight Outta Dunwoody" (a rap song about an upper-middle class suburb) and "Bday Bash" (annual concert held by a radio station in Atlanta).
• The current version of Family Feud moved here in 2011, to accommodate host Steve Harvey's other commitments (including being a radio host and having his own talk show); it previously taped in Hollywood and at Universal Studios in Orlando, and will be moving back to Hollywood in the near-future.
• Good Eats is primarily filmed in Alpharetta and Marietta, Georgia.
• The Neal Boortz Show
• The Real Housewives Of Atlanta, on Bravo.
• Love and Hip-Hop: Atlanta on VH1

Shows and films shot in Atlanta, but set elsewhere:

• Beyond the Gates (set in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.)
• Black Lightning (set in the fictional Freeland)
• Civil War (set in New York, Washington D.C., and the few hundreds of miles of rural areas in between)
• Devious Maids (set in Beverly Hills)
• The Divergent Series: Insurgent and Allegiant (set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago)^note however, portions of the former were actually filmed in Chicago
• Drop Dead Diva (set in Los Angeles)
• Halt and Catch Fire (set in the DFW Metroplex)
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1/Part 2 (set in the Capitol of Panem which is implied to be what’s now Salt Lake City, UT)
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Several movies were at least partially filmed in Atlanta: Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Black Panther, among others.
  • Some MCU shows were also partially filmed in Atlanta, including The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki.
• Necessary Roughness (set in Long Island)
• RoboCop 3 (As with everything else in the RoboCop franchise, it's set in Detroit)
• Stranger Things (set in Indiana)
• Sweet Home Alabama (2002) (set in Alabama)
• We Are Marshall (set in Huntington, West Virginia)^note Then-Georgia governor and former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue had a cameo as an opposing football coach

Creators originally from or based in Atlanta:

• The Weather Channel
• The Turner networks:
  • TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies
  • CNN & HLN
  • Cartoon Network & [adult swim] (and by extension Toonami)
  • WCW
• Jeff Foxworthy
• David Cross
• Micaela Dee
• Chloë Grace Moretz
• Tyler Perry
• Matt and Mike Chapman (The Brothers Chaps), creators of Homestar Runner
• Donald Glover
• Tiffany Grant
• RuPaul's Drag Race often features drag queens from Atlanta and the surrounding area, owing to its ginormous LGBT+ community and legendary drag scene. RuPaul himself started his drag career in Atlanta after moving there from San Diego as a teenager. He still has a soft spot for the city and will sometimes reminisce about it with contestants from there, especially the older ones like season 13's Tamisha Iman. Other Atlanta queens that have competed on the show include Season 7 winner Violet Chachki, Nicole Paige Brooks, Phoenix, Mariah Balenciaga, Trinity K. Bonet, Nina Bonina Brown, Aiden Zhane, LaLa Ri, and Angeria Paris VanMichaels.

Musical acts based in or originally from Atlanta:

• Atlanta has a huge rap and hip-hop scene, perhaps best known for spearheading the "Dirty South" movement, one of rap's most popular. A vast amount, possibly a majority nowadays, of rappers come from Atlanta, which produces a wide variety of acts such as OutKast (composed of Big Boi and Andre 3000), Soulja Boy, Lil' Jon, Ludacris, D4L, Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz, T.I., Future, Jeezy (formerly Young Jeezy, before he got old and the stage name stopped being accurate), Waka Flocka Flame, Rasheeda, Killer Mike, Crime Mob, Ying Yang Twins, Jazze Pha, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover's hip hop moniker), Dem Franchize Boys, Young Dro, Rich Homie Quan, Lil' Scrappy, Gorilla Zoe, Youngbloodz, Travis Porter, Migos, Field Mob, B.o.B (Rapper), Drumma Boy, Roscoe Dash, Yung Wun, I-20, Cyhi The Prynce, OJ Da Juiceman, Slick Pulla, Boyz n da Hood, Silentó, Pastor Troy, Playboi Carti, Yung Wun, Young Thug, Gunna, Unk, Trinidad James, Bone Crusher, Polow da Don, Yung Joc and JID.
• Many R&B artists also come from Atlanta: Usher, India.Arie, TLC, Cee Lo Green, Keri Hilson, Monica, Ciara, Chloe x Halle and Toni Braxton, to name a few.
• Atlanta-based producer Bill Lowery launched the careers of Ray Stevens, Jerry Reed, and others.
• Sevendust
• The Black Crowes
• Cat Power
• Canadian Justin Bieber moved to Atlanta to forward his music career.
• The Indigo Girls grew up in Decatur and started performing locally when they were students at Emory University.
• Mastodon
• Sugarland
• Issues
• Le Castle Vania

Hail Atlanta!