Location scout execs for Showtime comedy “SMILF” starring Frankie Shaw and Rosie O’Donnell have chosen Wellesley as a filming location for part of the Golden Globe-nominated show’s second season. The filming crew has been around town this week, particularly over at a drop-dead gorgeous five-bedroom, eight-bath Pembroke Rd. home currently for sale at $3,799,000, in case you’re in the market for a little Hollywood stardust to go with your trophy house.
Showtime’s website says the 30-minute weekly series stars Shaw as Bridgette Bird, “a smart, scrappy, young single mom trying to navigate life in South Boston with an extremely unconventional family. She struggles to make ends meet, which leads her to impulsive and at times immature decisions…SMILF takes on motherhood, co-parenting, and female sexuality through a raw and unfiltered lens.” The show, also created by Shaw, is apparently semi-autobiographical and brings to viewers ” an original and fresh new female voice.”
Fresh, indeed. I can’t tell you what SMILF stands for except to say that the first word is Southie, as in South Boston. The titles of the shows are innocuous enough, all with a food thing going such as “Family-Sized Popcorn & a Can of Wine,” “Chocolate Pudding & a Cooler of Gatorade,” and “Forty-Eight Burnt Cupcakes & Graveyard Rum.” The story lines range from the banal, as when baby daddy Rafi starts dating someone hot (jealousy ensues) to literary like the time when, in a nice twist on the Oedipus story, Bridgette matches with a man on Tinder who she believes to be her estranged father.
Intriguing.
A guy on private security detail told me yesterday that no stars have been onsite yet, but he WOULD say that wouldn’t he? Part of his job description is to shoo away pesky local news types, I’m sure. I’m not encouraging anybody to camp out in hopes of sighting Shaw or mega-star, O’Donnell, but if you happened to snap a pic of any of the action, do send it along.
Although I’d keep a respectful distance from O’Donnell if I were you. Not that she’d get rude or anything, but she’s got a long history with papparazzi, and it’s not pretty. Let’s show her how blase we are about all this in Wellesley.
Because face it, Wellesley is the perfect Hollywood shooting location mostly because of the sophistication of its residents, who have seen all of this so, so many times before. Yup, it’s just another day of lights, camera, action around here for us. We’ve hosted Will Ferrell when he was here shooting Daddy’s Home 2. Back in 2016 we served as location for Thoroughbred. By gosh, even the Connecticut State Lottery, unable to find a single picturesque spot in Fairfield County, has seen fit to film its commercials right in Wellesley Square. Twice.
Other spots the filming crews have been seen for this particular round of summer Hollywood excitement: Oak St. in the Italo-American parking lot, and beyond Wellesley, in nearby Newton.
Thanks to sharp-eyed readers PH and MF.
Walked by there with my dog today. I live on the next street over and walk down Pembroke regularly. I had no idea anything was happening. My dog likes to stop and sniff all the things but we were moving along. A woman approached me (who I realized later had been following me from across the street) and told me I was “allowed to walk down the street but not allowed to stop.” You’ve gotta be kidding me. We’ve been in this neighborhood for 25 years and you’re telling me how to walk down the street (technically I was on the sidewalk on the opposite side, not the street anyway). I’ve been around plenty of movie crews filming scenes in Boston and nyc and they usually don’t treat passers by this way. Can’t wait till they’re gone!