Ten times before, I’ve reeled off a series of movie and TV moments referencing our very own New Haven, Connecticut.
Here’s number 11, which I promise, unlike the 11th and final season of The Walking Dead, isn’t just lumbering along without any brains left to ingest.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen (2026), S1E1, 11:00
If you can believe it, this show begins ominously. A creepy slow-mo wedding walk drenched in fear and doubt implies something bad is indeed going to happen. But a sudden cut to a low rolling shot through the hallway of some kind of hotel from hell turns that implication to certainty. A frenzy of shrill screams over a bending groan and a dark floor puddled with something suspiciously viscous suggests the passing doors lead not to honeymoon suites but torture chambers. It’s almost too much to take, before a happy harmonica and an uptempo drum beat cue a cut to the now seemingly happy couple on a road trip. A text splash tells us we’ve entered the main narrative timeline, five days before the wedding. But the initial creepy feeling never really leaves. It rides in the backseat, eats at the roadside diner, holds its breath and touches the car ceiling with the couple as they take our very own Heroes Tunnel through the barbed wintry hulk of West Rock. The groom can’t quite make it all the way, losing his lungs in a sputter. “I’m sorry. It was a long tunnel,” he says. “Oh,” his bride replies with a disappointed moan. “That’s bad luck.”
Below Deck (2015), S3E15, 28:11
During a reunion episode of this reality show following the crew of a high-end charter yacht, consummate reunion moderator Andy Cohen interrogates the cast of an especially choppy season, including by relaying viewer questions. Finally, courtesy of an Elm Citizen, Cohen pursues a line of questioning I’m sure many viewers were waiting for. “Mona from New Haven, Connecticut, said, ‘Eddie, once might be a slip-up, but you had sex with Rocky four times. How could you ghost her on the boat after that?’” Naturally—at least if you’d watched the show and had already seen him floundering—Eddie’s answer didn’t quite make it to port.
Suits (2016), S6E3, 36:50
With the once-invincible, now-scandalized corporate law firm of Pearson Specter Litt hemorrhaging both clients and staff, named partner and eccentric comedic relief Louis Litt has hastily subleased part of the firm’s offices to someone he soon discovers he can’t stand: securities trader Stu Bazzini. First Bazzini threw out Litt’s prune juice from the communal fridge. Then he raided Litt’s raspberry bran bars. The final straw? Bazzini let some of his traders play touch football in Litt’s cherished “bullpen,” the part of the office where he used to whip the firm’s early-career associates into shape. “Don’t ever mess with a Harvard goddamn lawyer,” Litt says as he hands Bazzini an eviction notice (the show is famously willing to insert that adjective anywhere)—which seeds Bazzini’s final retort late in the episode, after the trader gets one of Litt’s partners to not only cancel the eviction but expand the lease. During a confrontation in the bullpen, which is now Bazzini’s, the brash broker drops the mic with a nod to New Haven. “You may be a Harvard-educated lawyer, but I’m a Yale-educated lawyer, and the difference between me and you is I know the real money’s in trading. Now get the hell outta my bullpen.”
Blue Moon (2025), 11:30, 17:30
“Who’s ever been loved enough? Who’s ever been loved half enough?” Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) asks one night in 1943, obliquely trying to process the fact that his estranged longtime songwriting partner Richard Rodgers is about to score the biggest hit of his career with a different collaborator, Richard Hammerstein II. The show, opening that very evening on Broadway, is Oklahoma!, and Hart is sitting in a nearby bar, failing to stick to his sobriety, waiting for the after-party to start so he can convince Rodgers to take him back. “I saw the show a couple of times in previews in New Haven back when they were still calling it Away We Go!,” Hart says to the bartender and the piano man, teeing up his critique of the show as an artless, humorless, pandering mess. New Haven makes other cameos on this fateful night, including surrounding an ingenue: Yale arts student Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), the object of Hart’s hopeless December-May crush. And in case you don’t already know, the main facts of the movie are true to life. Rodgers and Hart did write Broadway songs together; Rodgers did replace the less reliable, more disagreeable, booze-addicted Hart with Hammerstein, forming the duo that would become almost synonymous with popular musicals; and the huge Broadway hit Oklahoma!, née Away We Go!, really did open in New Haven first.
Written by Dan Mims. Image features Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon (2025).
