Warning: Spoilers for Teenage Bounty Hunters Episode 9.
Whatever the opposite of Liz Lemon's "I want to go to there" is how I feel about Nandina, Georgia from Teenage Bounty Hunters. While the town from the new Netflix series is named after a real street that showrunner Kathleen Jordan lived on as a baby, the town itself isn't real. But it does have elements of the real Georgia to it.
On the show, twins Blair (Anjelica Bette Fellini) and Sterling (Maddie Phillips) think their mom is hiding something. So when Blair discovers that a photo of her mom labeled as being in Savannah, Georgia is really in Nandina, the girls decide to drive to the town and investigate for themselves. Nandina is small and rural, not unlike tiny Georgia towns like Ball Ground and Swainsboro with populations of only a couple of thousand people.
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Nandina is notable for its ramshackle church (Tabernacle Church of Christ the Redeemer, The Living God, and His Army) that believes in the rapture and houses snakes. It's also home to a BBQ joint called Hobo's Ham that was apparently on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, according to Blair's Google search. (It was probably the "Dives" part of that show.) Like Nandina, the church and the BBQ restaurant are also made-up places. There is a brand sold in Georgia called Hobe's Country Ham that looks very good and not at all like Hobo's Ham in the show.
There's also no church with that exact name in Georgia, but there is a small town that's having a problem with a controversial megachurch wanting to move in. The town is called Flowery Branch, so it shares a botanical name with Nandina which means "heavenly bamboo." According to the Gainesville Times, the La Luz Del Mundo church (meaning The Light of the World) wants to open a large complex on Hog Mountain Road in Flowery Branch. Some residents of the town have called the church a cult and have petitioned against the construction.
But more likely series creator Jordan was inspired to write about Nandina based on what she knows of the state, as Fellini tells Refinery29. "I loved how [Jordan] sort of came at [the show] from her own experience with religion and faith and growing up in Georgia," the actor says.
Jordan went to a Christian school in Atlanta, seemingly not unlike the one Blair and Sterling go to. And Jordan has ties to Decatur, Georgia through her mom who founded a summer camp there, and Albany, Georgia via her dad whose biography she helped write. So Jordan has enough experience with Georgia to keep Nandina somewhat rooted in reality, but Jordan is also very glad it's not completely real.
"[Nandina] is the street that I grew up on. Or I was born on in Florida and then I moved to Atlanta. What a ridiculous place," she told Refinery29.
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