The ABC sitcom that ran for 11 seasons, set explicitly in this borough
| Network | ABC |
| Seasons | 11 (2013–2024) |
| Creator | Adam F. Goldberg |
| Setting | Jenkintown, PA (1980s) |
| Basis | Goldberg's actual childhood in Jenkintown |
| National Geographic profile | 2015 — "Pennsylvania's Mayberry" |
The Goldbergs is an ABC sitcom that premiered September 18, 2013, and ran for 11 seasons, concluding in 2024. Created by Adam F. Goldberg, the show is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in a loud, dense, emotionally overwhelming family in 1980s Jenkintown. Goldberg plays a fictionalized version of himself — a kid obsessed with movies, armed with a camcorder, surrounded by a mother, Beverly, who loves so hard it functions as aggression, and a father, Murray, who communicates primarily through grunts from a recliner.
The show is set explicitly in Jenkintown. Not "a suburb of Philadelphia." Jenkintown. The actual borough, with its actual streets, its actual schools, its actual geography. This specificity is unusual in network television, where shows are often set in fictional equivalents of real places to avoid complications. Goldberg's insistence on naming the real place is part of what gives the show its texture.
The fictional Goldberg house was modeled on real homes in the borough. The Kremps of Newbold Road — a real Jenkintown family — were featured in a CBS Philadelphia news segment when the show premiered, noting that the street and the house design in the show reflected their actual neighborhood. The segment was part of a broader local media moment when Jenkintown residents realized the show was about them.
Longtime Jenkintown residents who watched the show have noted that Goldberg's depictions of the borough's character — the tight social fabric, the density of community, the way everyone's business was more or less public knowledge — were accurate to the experience of growing up here. The show didn't exaggerate Jenkintown's communal nature for comedic effect; it reflected it.
In 2015, National Geographic profiled Jenkintown and used the word "Mayberry" — as in the small-town setting of The Andy Griffith Show — to characterize the borough's community culture. The piece led with The Goldbergs and Bradley Cooper as the two cultural hooks that explained why a national magazine was paying attention to a half-square-mile borough in Montgomery County.
Residents interviewed for the piece appeared to accept the Mayberry characterization with a mixture of pride and mild embarrassment — which is probably the right way to receive it. It's a compliment that contains a small sting, depending on who's offering it.
What The Goldbergs helped crystallize for people outside the region is something Jenkintown residents had started to notice: three nationally recognized entertainers — Bradley Cooper, Adam F. Goldberg, and Nick Kroll — all came from the same half-square-mile borough. Add John Mulaney's formative years in the area and his documented friendship with Kroll (forged during their school years here), and the concentration becomes genuinely unusual.
There's no clean explanation for why this happened. The borough's school district produced a close-knit cohort in each generation. The community was small enough that people who shared creative instincts found each other. And the place itself had enough character — enough of a distinct identity — to leave a mark worth writing and performing about. That's not nothing, for a borough most people have never heard of.
The Goldbergs wasn't a show about suburban Pennsylvania in the abstract — it was a show about a specific place with a specific feeling. Jenkintown in the 1980s, as portrayed in the show, is: dense, warm, intrusive, opinionated, and suffocatingly communal in the way that only very small communities can be. You know your neighbors' business. Your mother knows what you did before you get home. The same faces show up at every event because there aren't enough people for the faces to rotate.
That portrait, Jenkintown residents say, is accurate. The show didn't have to exaggerate the community for effect — it just had to describe it. See also: community events and notable people.