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Outer Banks, as the name might suggest, is set in and among the barrier islands of North Carolina and Virginia. Originally, the Netflix treasure-hunting drama was due to be filmed at the Outer Banks themselves. However, a little political activism on the part of Netflix led to the original plan to shoot the show in Wilmington, North Carolina, being scrapped.
In January 2019, Netflix announced that it would not shoot Outer Banks, which was then known as OBX, in North Carolina. According to The Hollywood Reporter, this was in part due to the state's House Bill 2. Known to many as "the bathroom bill," the law required transgender people to use the restrooms that matched the sex written on their birth certificate.
Though part of this bill was repealed when it became one of the most-discussed and notorious pieces of legislation in modern political discourse, certain parts of the bills considered discriminatory to LGBTQ+ people remain in force in the state.
At the time, Outer Banks co-creator Jonas Pate, a resident of Wilmington, told The Fayetteville Observer, "This tiny law is costing this town 70 good, clean, pension-paying jobs and also sending a message to those people who can bring these jobs and more that North Carolina still doesn't get it."
Instead of shooting in North Carolina, Outer Banks was instead filed in Charleston, South Carolina. Speaking to Wilmington Star News in April 2020, Pate said: "When we wrote it, it was 100 percent Wilmington in our heads. We wanted to film it here. But Netflix made the right decision to insist on inclusivity and we completely agree with them."
The island at the heart of Outer Bank is a fictional one in North Carolina, the wealthy side of which is known as Figure 8 and the lower-class portion of which is The Cut—a location partly modeled on NC's Snow's Cut.
He added: "We were lucky because we weren't trying to recreate Duck or anything. It was a fictional town and island on the Outer Banks, so we could really create whatever visual landscape we wanted."
Among the Charleston locations that can be spotted in the show are the James and Jones islands as well the Mount Pleasant Old Village. The show's lighthouse, meanwhile, is the Morris Island Lighthouse. Other reports mentioned that filming took place in downtown Charleston and the city's Galliard Center. Among the islands used in the shoot were Beaufort's Barrier Islands as well as the Kiawah and Hunting Island.
Though filmed in SC, NC locations like Cheerwine, Chapel Hill and Masonboro Island get referenced in Outer Banks.
Outer Banks is streaming now on Netflix.
