With all the think pieces about Looking, HBO's new drama about three gay men in San Francisco, few have remarked on one of the series' most notable qualities: It deftly captures the look and feel of the city. Some will argue against this — and yes, just as Looking can't possibly reflect every gay man's experience, it isn't true to life for every San Franciscan. But the show embodies the spirit of the city, more so than most TV series set in the Bay Area. Parenthood, for example, takes places in Berkeley but might as well be any city on the West Coast.

I'm not a San Francisco native, but I did spend seven years in the Bay Area while I attended Berkeley, and later as a writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle. My assessment of the city here is based on my own observations, so again, your mileage may vary.

As I was analyzing the representation of San Francisco in Looking, I kept coming back to Tales of the City, the 1993 miniseries that depicts the city in 1976. It's based on the first book in Armistead Maupin's iconic series (which recently concluded) and remains a brilliant time capsule of the city in all its '70s glory.

What I found was that so much of what makes Tales of the City an intrinsically San Francisco story is the same as what captured my attention on Looking. Beyond the facial hair and MUNI use, Looking is thematically linked to the San Francisco of Tales of the City, though they're set almost 40 years apart. The city has changed in innumerable ways, both for better and worse, but so many of its affectations and concerns remain the same across decades. These are the areas where Looking and Tales of the City converge.