It's Always Sunny in Miami

The sun's a-shinin', the town's a-bustlin', yes, It's Always Sunny In Miami! When in a show the weather is completely static (except in extreme situations), this trope comes in. In shows with this trope, the current weather almost never changes, and locations with notoriously volatile weather rarely have it affect the plot. This might be because the producers don't have enough money or technology for realistic weather, or that they don't want to have hurricanes or tornadoes crashing the plot. Yes, It's Always Sunny In Miami! Note: Anyone who believes this has never been to Florida, much less Miami. It rains a little over 60 percent of the time. You have been warned.

Related to Forest of Perpetual Autumn, It's Always Spring, It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Single-Season Country. Also a consequence of Hollywood Provincialism.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Used in an airline commercial advertising affordable rates to Florida, where some tourists claim "the weather was better yesterday" when a solitary cloud moves in front of the sun for less than a minute.

Anime and Manga

• In One Piece, there's the island of Enies Lobby, also called the "Nightless Island" because, for some reason, it's always sunny, even in the middle of a huge storm.

Comic Books

• Regardless of the medium, it's almost always daytime in Metropolis, whereas it's almost always nighttime in Gotham City. This has a lot to do with when their respective superheroes like to do their work.
  • This prevails to such an extent that Metropolis is lit like Vegas at night and Gotham is overcast during the day. Both characters have commented upon it while visiting each other's cities. Animators in the DC Animated Universe once said that there was something inherently wrong in drawing Gotham on a bright sunny day.
  • Interestingly enough, it's almost always night in Metropolis in Smallville. Director commentary said that establishing day shots of the city always looked horrible and they almost never used them.
  • Played straight with Gotham in Batman Begins, but averted in The Dark Knight, which has many scenes of Gotham (filmed in Chicago) in broad daylight.

Film

• Averted in Key Largo where a hurricane striking the island becomes a plot point.
• It is almost always sunset in Michael Bay movies.
• According to most movies, California is also sunny and green all the time. Winter can get surprisingly wet and windy for non-natives, especially along the coast and/or in the northern part of the state where random rainstorms last on and off for days, and it takes until March for most of the plants to stop looking half-dead.
  • Satirized in the Spike Jones song "It Never Rains In Sunny California".
• Averted... sort of, in Get Shorty. The opening is set in Miami, and it's snowing. Everyone complains about it.

Literature

• Parodied in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where it's always Saturday afternoon on Ursa Minor Beta, everywhere except those places which have instead a perpetual early Saturday evening.
  • And beyond that lie the nightclubs.

Live-Action TV

• Murdoch Mysteries: With a few exceptions, it's almost always bright and sunny in the late 19th-century Toronto. Even overcast days are rare, and winter seems practically non-existent.
• You'll never find a rainy, overcast, or any other kind of day but sunny in the Miami of Burn Notice unless it's important to the plot. In fairness, however, Burn Notice emphatically averts California Doubling and Hollywood Provincialism, and is actually shot in and around Miami (the main shooting location being Hollywood, Florida, a few miles to the north). If it's sunny on Burn Notice, that means it was actually sunny in Miami on the day they were shooting.
• Neighbours has a rule that it never rains on Ramsey Street. A behind the scenes special showed that on rainy days outdoor shots are artificially lit to make it look like summer. However, it still rains in Summer Bay. One notable example is in the Hearts Divided DVD, which clearly shows that the rain was a contributing factor in Dani not being able to avoid hitting Kane. And it certainly has a lot of stormy weather. Hasn't significant portions of the town slid into the sea during various tempests (blurry on the details). Usually someone dies.
• CSI-verse:
  • Somewhat justified in CSI, seeing as how Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert. It's occasionally averted when the weather is plot-relevant.
  • Played straight for most of CSI: Miami. The notable exceptions are again plot-driven, "Hurricane Anthony" and "Crime Wave," which involves a tsunami.
  • CSI: NY Also played straight for the most part, but the show actually has a few non-plot driven rainy scenes. Lindsay goes for a rain-walk during the Danny/Ricki arc, and it's raining as Mac and Flack arrest a suspect in the Valentine's Day episode, "Blood Actually." Also averted in season 1's "Rain" where evidence gets washed away, and being set farther north than it's cousins, snow plays a factor in a few episodes as well.
• Justified in The Golden Girls, as the series is about four older women who moved to Miami precisely because of the warmer weather. However, one episode dealt with the girls being shut in due to a hurricane, and one of the Christmas Episodes ends with it (naturally) snowing.
• It's virtually always sunny in Dexter's Miami.
• Somehow, it's always sunny in the Royal Pains Hamptons. This makes rather less sense than in Miami, although again, semi-justified by the fact that all shooting is actually on-location in the Hamptons (or at least Long Island).
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an example, referenced right in the title. It can get very cold in Philadelphia, but the weather in the show is always sunny and warm. Even during one episode where the city is under threat of a super-storm, Frank points out that the weather is still as sunny as ever. The original short that served as a proto-pilot for the show is titled "It's Always Sunny on Television," referencing the trope even more overtly.
• American Horror Story: Coven is based in New Orleans, but the weather is consistently sunny and gorgeous. While Hurricane Katrina is mentioned a few times, never does the weather affect the plot.
• Zig-zagged on True Blood, at first it was widely believed that Sookie and Jason's parents were killed in a car accident during a flood, but it was later revealed that they were murdered by the vampire Warlow. Otherwise, the weather is never problematic. This is averted in the novels, where Hurricane Katrina significantly affects the lives of Louisiana's supernatural community.

Video Games

• Destroy All Humans! series (although weather changes from city to city, the weather of that city always stays the same)
• Averted in most cRPGs.
• It was always daytime in the original Pokémon Red and Blue games. The next generation fixed this. Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire went back to perpetual daytime, due to some (in retrospect, rather minor) technical problems. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl re-added the time of day feature. Pokémon Black and White retained this in addition to averting It's Always Spring, but that's a different matter entirely.)
• Averted in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The titular city is based on Miami and Key West, and it can rain occasionally. The bridges to the second island are even blocked off due to a hurricane warning.
• The PS1 generation Final Fantasy games had this problem. Typically the entire world map would be perpetually daylight, except for just one or two spots on the map. So it will always be nighttime in Midgar and Treno. FFIX lampshades this a bit by calling Treno the "Dark City". Other places can become night, but only when the plot demands it. The PS2 Final Fantasy XII avoids this a bit by throwing in weather cycles in every location, but never a day-night cycle.

Webcomics

• Parodied early in 8-Bit Theater: it is noted that it never gets dark until they go to the inn. This later becomes a plot point where the Light Warriors have a day to prepare for a fight... and Fighter immediately goes to an inn after they realize it works this way.

Western Animation

• It's always snowy in South Park, except for a few weeks in summer.

Real Life

• Some could argue that Reality Is Unrealistic. While Miami and New Orleans are constantly at war for the title of America's rainiest city, they don't have the most rainy days. That title goes to Buffalo and Rochester, New York. Southern cities might rain harder, but it doesn't happen as often, and there are plenty of sunny days in between.
• If you live in a cold and clouded country, hot places become this. What people would view as cold there would be boiling for tourists. In the non-mountain regions of Southern California, people start breaking out jackets if the temperature is below around 68 degrees. Twenty degrees below that, Bostonians are wearing shorts and tank tops.
• Rainforests at the equator tend to have the same weather (even down to the same sunset and sunrise times, which is at all parts of the equator,) which is wet, hot and humid all year round. The moonsoon is the exception in some parts. Often its so humid and cloudy that the temperature does not change much in the night either.
• People who live in the Pacific Northwest (Northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia) like to characterize it as either constantly raining or looking like it's about to rain. Of course, it doesn't actually snow very much either, especially in the places in Oregon where most people live.
  • As do people from Japan, Korea, and to an extent the British Isles (G. K. Chesterton once said it was unpatriotic for an Englishman to dislike rain, since it's always raining in his country).
  • Conversely, someone living in an area with a cold continental climate will be amazed to hear Londoners complain and complain about how cold it is - because compared to winter in much of Eastern Europe, Asia, and North America, a "cold" day in London would be a particularly nice winter's day - maybe even a nice early spring day.
• Before Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans, stories based in Louisiana rarely showed how severe the weather can get. Sure there'd be rain, but not the hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods that plague the state.

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