TNT · six seasons, 75 episodes · developed by Jonathan Lisco from David Michôd's 2010 film
Where was Animal Kingdom filmed?
Deran Cody's bar has its front door in Oceanside and its inside in Los Angeles. The door is in a low stucco building on the corner of Tremont Street and Wisconsin Avenue, a short walk from the beach; in the 1960s and 70s it was the town's Department of Motor Vehicles office. The bar itself, the room behind the door, was filmed on a studio lot.
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places on the route
Oceanside from the harbour down to Oceanside Boulevard, with its airport inland; San Onofre up the coast; the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where is Animal Kingdom filmed? Partly in Oceanside, the beach town in north San Diego County where the Codys live. The mayor, Peter Weiss, said as much in 2019, when he called the arrangement good business. The crew came down from Los Angeles for a few days to a week at a time, and Shawn Hatosy, who plays Pope, talks of five days to shoot, sometimes six episodes' worth of outdoor scenes: whatever needed the ocean, the big set pieces, a lot of the action. Much of the show was filmed 140 kilometres to the north-west, at Warner Bros. in Burbank, and on and off between 2017 and 2021 in the Santa Clarita Valley. The Australian film of 2010 that the series is based on is a separate case: it was shot in Melbourne.
An Animal Kingdom filming locations map has two ends, and they work differently. The Codys' own places are at the Los Angeles end, or behind a door that is not theirs: Smurf's house was rebuilt as a set in Burbank, and the bar is a private building that only plays one. Oceanside's own places are the ones you can walk into: the pier, the Strand, a surf shop on Coast Highway, a bar on South Tremont.
Where is Deran's bar?
Deran's bar: the old DMV building at Tremont and Wisconsin
314 Wisconsin Avenue, on the corner of South Tremont Street, Oceanside. A private building; the bar is only on screen.
Deran's bar, The Drop, is 314 Wisconsin Avenue, the old DMV building on the north-west corner of Tremont Street. Visit Oceanside, the town's tourist office, shows it in a still marked season two, episode nine: the camera looks across the street at a pale stucco front between palms, with 314 on the wall. That front plays the bar through the series, and in May 2021 it was on the schedule again for the last season. Deran, the youngest of the Cody brothers, is played by Jake Weary, and in the fifth season the Liquor Board starts confiscating his stock.
The building has had other lives. After the DMV it housed Thunderbird, Thomas Yearsley's recording studio. By 2017 Yearsley had moved the studio to south Oceanside, and he still wished the show would go away, because his home town, he said, is not full of murderers. The space was Killfish by then, selling clothes and fishing tackle. Its co-owner, Rick Tierney, born and raised in Oceanside, said he was in the middle about it: he disliked the show making the place look like a gangster town, and he liked the idea that looking bad might slow gentrification down.
It is a private building, with no bar inside to walk into, and the view the show used is the one from the pavement. The pub the crew did film inside stood across the street.
626 South Tremont Street, Oceanside, across the street from the bar. The pub moved out in 2021.
Here the show did go indoors. In 2016, before the first episode aired, Shawn Hatosy was asked whether he had been to the Flying Pig and said they had filmed in it. He remembered a boar's head on the wall, or something of the kind, and admitted his memory of the day was hazy. Shawn Ambrose, who owns Real Surf, names the pub and his own shop as two of the few Oceanside businesses whose interiors the production used. The Flying Pig's name was spoken on air as well, and Leslie Gaul, who ran the town's tourist office, said in 2017 that mentions like that had brought independent restaurants more trade.
The owner, Roddy Browning, remembered the actors bringing their families in to eat on days they were not filming. In March 2021 Browning and his wife, Aaron, took the Flying Pig off Tremont Street and moved it north, into a building they had bought on Mission Avenue. The pub on Mission Avenue is the same business in another room. The room Hatosy remembers is the one on Tremont.
South Coast Highway and South Tremont Street, Oceanside, within a kilometre of the bar. A surf shop, a bar and a bowling alley, all trading.
Real Surf plays the surf shop of Adrian (Spencer Treat Clark), the man Deran falls for. The production used it inside and out. Its owner, Shawn Ambrose, says the crew made sure his clothing logo got into the shots, the actors came in and bought boards for themselves, and when Adrian is caught at an airport with drugs hidden in a surfboard, the board was one of his. In 2019 he said that people who had found the series on Netflix were still coming in for the T-shirts.
Larry's Beach Club, further down South Tremont from Deran's bar, has been on screen as well. In 2019 Carole Bullington-Griffin, a bartender there, said a family had come in from Ohio because they had seen Larry's in one of the old episodes. There are drugs in Oceanside, she allowed, but she did not think anyone who lived there would watch the show and take it for a picture of themselves. One Wednesday that year, her customers who watched the series were all worried about the same thing: for the good of the show, Smurf should not have been killed off.
Surf Bowl, a bowling alley further south on Coast Highway, was a location too, according to Kristi Hawthorne, who runs the Oceanside Historical Society.
411 North Hollywood Way, Burbank, Los Angeles County, 140 km north-west of Oceanside. A working studio lot, not open to visitors.
In the story Smurf, Ellen Barkin's matriarch, lives in Oceanside, and her house is where J is sent to live after his mother's overdose. By 2017 the house had been rebuilt as a set on the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank, modelled on the one the pilot used. On 15 May that year the cast came to a tacos-and-tequila party at the ranch to open the second season, and the guests got to see the house close up: the kitchen, a couch, the pool.
Columbia ran the ranch as a backlot from 1934, and Bewitched and The Partridge Family were filmed on it.
In 2019 the San Diego Reader's Ken Leighton wrote that the house playing Smurf's home in Oceanside was in fact in Long Beach. It is a private house, and its street is not given here.
The pier, the harbour and the beach
Oceanside Pier and the amphitheatre
Oceanside Pier on an overcast day, 12 March 2013, with the Ruby's building at the far end.
200 North The Strand, Oceanside. Open past the bait shop; the far west end is closed until it is rebuilt.
In 2016 Hatosy was asked which places locals would recognise, and he started with the shot he called the show's signature: J riding his bicycle along the pier, tall palms moving in the sea wind, the tyres rolling over the faded boards. The first episode ends on the pier too.
The pier is wooden and about 590 metres long. The one standing now is the sixth, opened in 1987, and its railings carry names engraved in 1988 to raise money for the city's centenary. On 25 April 2024 a fire at the far end destroyed two buildings there: the empty restaurant that had been Ruby's diner, and a small takeaway, the Brine Box. The city had most of the pier open again by 10 May, with almost all of the engraved names saved, and the wreckage was cleared by February 2025. The far west end, where Ruby's stood, stays closed until the deck out there is rebuilt.
At the foot of the pier, on the sand, is the amphitheatre: a bandshell of 1937 built by the Works Progress Administration, with fixed benches for 1,500 people, where Oceanside High holds its graduations. Since 2012 it has carried the name of Junior Seau, the town's football hero. In the tourist office's still of it, marked season two, episode thirteen, two young people sit facing each other on the benches, with a sign for Ruby's on a post behind them. Films have used the same stage: the cheerleading final of Bring It On (2000) was shot here, and in Purple Hearts (2022) the star sings the film's songs from it.
The harbour, the airport and the station
The OCEANSIDE letters on a grassy slope at the harbour, 29 December 2020.
North Pacific Street, just over a kilometre north of the pier; the municipal airport, 4 km north-east; Oceanside Transit Center, 500 m inland. All three are working places.
The tourist office's still from the harbour is marked season three, episode ten. Two young people sit at a table by the water with plates between them, and on the grass slope across the water behind them the letters of OCEANSIDE stand in a row. Harbor Pelican, on North Pacific Street, is one of the places the show used there: a fish market whose owners catch what they sell.
The airport, four kilometres north-east of the pier, has one runway and lists filming among its services, next to fuel and hangar space. The tourist office illustrates it with two frames marked season one, episode four: a boxy high-winged plane on a runway.
Oceanside Transit Center, 500 metres inland from the pier, was a location as well. Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner stops here, and it is the end of the line for Metrolink, the Los Angeles commuter railway; there is no other Metrolink station in San Diego County. The present station dates from 1984.
San Onofre State Beach
A surfer on a wave off the cobbled shore at Trestles, San Onofre State Beach, 2 September 2015. Black and white.
San Diego County, about 27 km up the coast from Oceanside Pier. A state park on land leased from the Marine Corps.
Of the places Hatosy named in 2016, San Onofre State Beach is the one outside Oceanside, about 27 kilometres up the coast. The park is a run of beaches under sandstone bluffs, on land the Marine Corps leases to the state, with a campground along the old Route 101 and a surf spot called Trestles at the end of a nature trail. Inside the park is Panhe, an Acjachemen village more than 8,000 years old, which the Acjachemen still keep as a sacred and burial site. Hatosy has called the town a character in the show in its own right, and he counts the surf as part of it.
The Strand, south to Wisconsin Avenue
Palms, the road along the beach and the sand, with Oceanside Pier in the distance, 2 June 2015.
The Strand and Pacific Street, Oceanside, from the pier south to Oceanside Boulevard. A public beach road, with small parks along it.
South of the pier the Strand runs along the edge of the sand, and the show used it, and Pacific Street beside it, from the first season to the last. Two small parks on the way down, Pacific Street Linear Park and Tyson Street Park, were locations, and so was lifeguard tower 9, 650 metres past Wisconsin Avenue at the end of Oceanside Boulevard.
Where the Strand runs out, the show built a skate ramp for its last season, on an empty lot where Pacific Street meets Wisconsin Avenue, 280 metres down the avenue from Deran's bar. That season goes back to the Codys when they were young, and young Pope wanted to skate for a living. In May 2021 Hatosy skated the ramp himself, working with the professional Mike McGill, while a crowd watched from the end of the Strand. The lot was fenced, and guards were posted on it day and night. Oceanside's own skaters went down to try it and were sent off, though they had offered to skate in the background for nothing, said Josh Carson, known locally as the mayor of the Alex Road skate park.
Carson remembered an earlier ramp by the beach, one block inland from the pier. It opened in 1998, and the city shut it in 2002. This one was built to come down once the crew left town, on 23 May.
