Coolest Club Ever

Night clubs in television are always much cooler, bigger, and cleaner than the ones you find in the downtown of your town (unless your town happens to be New York City, Tokyo, Ibiza or London). Expect to see a line around the block to get in whether the club is full or not, though some people need only wink at the Bouncer or have a spot on the guest list and in they go (this seldom includes the main protagonist unless they're a sexy female).

Clubs in television also seem to be packed no matter what night of the week it is, and the bouncers seem to have no problem letting teenagers in the front doors (again, except the main characters). Furthermore, everyone of relevance to the plot will hang out at the same one.

Often a Bad Guy Bar and rarely a Good Guy Bar (because Evil Is Cool and Good Is Boring).

See also Where Everybody Knows Your Flame, for the gay version.

Examples of Coolest Club Ever include:

Advertising

• Carlsberg don't do nightclubs...

Anime and Manga

• The Altair Bar in A Piece of Phantasmagoria is the site to see and be seen. Its building is even star-shaped, to make it even more clear.

Comic Books

• The club/bar where the criminal element makes its home in The Crow is an excellent example, with far more people than a run-down dive like that place would expect, and much better live acts...though that could be explained by its being the home base of the city's criminal kingpin.
• Chaos Theater, anyone? The owner may be one of the worst assholes ever, and Ramona's 7th Evil Ex, but his club was still a nice place, with video games, music, stage for concerts, and a planned, but scrapped by the author, skate park.

Film

• The "End of Line Club" from Tron: Legacy. The name also doubles as a Call Back.
• The "House of Pain" in Blade 2 appeared to be a popular hangout for the young, beautiful Vampire crowd.
• The Matrix: The Merovingian's Hel Club.
• The "Retinal Fetish" club in Strange Days features live rock shows, performance art, sadomasochism games, mosh pits, crazy lights, smoke machines, and of course an upstairs lounge where villains and thugs hang out. Bonus points for acting like it's totally independent - housed in an abandoned building with exposed cabling everywhere and wire fencing for secure areas.
• The unnamed club where John Travolta's character hung out in Swordfish appeared to be populated exclusively by gorgeous models.
• In The Breakup, Vince Vaughn's brother takes him to a super cool club, making him feel intimidated and out of his element.
• A Night at the Roxbury: Exit, which is dreamed up by the main characters, where the inside looks like the outside, and the outside looks like the inside.
• Hackers features Cyberdelia, an appropriate 'cyber-nightclub that has a full complement of skate ramps, a video game console about as large as a mid-sized room, and of course, techno music. It's also by invite only.
• The Ink & Paint Club in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a speakeasy run by cartoon characters.

Literature

• Wicked Lovely brings us the Rath and Ruins. If you have read the series, you want to go there. No exceptions.
  • Semi-justified with it being a club for The Fair Folk though.
• The Dresden Files has a club called 0, run by the White Court. Everywhere one looks, there are couples, threesomes, foursomes and nineteensomes, a variety of substances to snort, swallow or inject, and even biohazard bins to dispose of the syringes in. Just because they're a bunch of evil vampires doesn't mean they're irresponsible.
• Moon Over Soho has quite a variety of cool clubs, including the Real Life "Groucho Club", unfortunately they are all murder scenes due to the Monster Of The Book being a vampire that feeds off of Jazz musicians' brains (It Makes Sense in Context).

Live Action TV

• In the fourth season of 24, terrorist leader Habib Marwan records a videotaped message in a nightclub that plays a remixed version of the show's title theme music, and is still open, even though the whole city was affected by a blackout from an EMP surge. If that's not dedication, I don't know what is.
  • Must have been run by an expatriated New Orleanian. A number of our clubs and bars didn't even close for Katrina.
• The Bronze in Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an unending lineup of top quality bands, and is full seven nights a week.
  • Well, Mayor Wilkins spared no expense to make his town attractive to homeowners so the monsters could eat them. The problem is that it's still open several years after Buffy blows him up. Maybe Willow did it?
  • "Man, I hate playing vampire towns."
• P3 from Charmed was a brilliant way for The WB to promote artists on the Time Warner label. One ep labeled Michelle Branch as a "Special Musical Guest" (WB shows her performing one of her songs, and then they show the three sisters talking at the club).
• CSI: Miami seems to have a new "coolest club ever" every third episode. The one that I remember most starkly is the club where hot men poured honey over hot women on stage (and the customers removed it using fruit).
  • The original CSI, being set in Vegas, also had its share of memorable clubs, has did CSI:NY. Miami just uses the Coolest Club Ever formula more frequently then its sister shows.
• Subverted (awesomely) in the How I Met Your Mother episode "Okay Awesome", wherein the main characters excitedly visit a cool, new, and exclusive club, only to find that they really hate it and can't enjoy themselves, with Ted, the main character, eventually determining that everything one is traditionally supposed to like actually sucks.
• Gossip Girl has the Chuck owned 'Victrola' and dozens of clubs all willing to let in any of the cast, despite them pretty much all being underage, often by half a decade or more.
• The club on The OC has top-tier indie bands playing most nights of the week - mostly ignored by the cast.
  • Justified by the location.
• Babylon from Queer as Folk.
• Averted in Smallville, since it's, well, a small ville. The closest thing to a club nearby is a dingy redneck bar. When the scenes shift to Metropolis, a few Cool Clubs make brief appearances.
• The Cirque Du Soleil series Solstrom revealed in its Grand Finale that the sun creatures stopped on Earth on their way to a planet that houses the Coolest Club in the Galaxy, and the episode takes place there. The clientle, naturally, is mostly alien, but they have the same line at the door and the Running Gag of the episode has an "Inoffensive Crank" trying to get past the doorman and his robot bouncers.
• Used/parodied in an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, in which Tommy spends the entire episode trying to get past a bouncer and into a trendy new club. He succeeds near the end, immediately after which it is revealed that it lost it's trendiness, and is practically deserted.
• The disco in Kenosha on That '70s Show.
• Castle seems to have one of these every other week. Granted they are in New York but considering how elaborate and expensive looking a lot of these clubs seem, it's hard to believe that the main characters, both being locals, had never even heard of these places before they were on the case.
• Sex and the City uses this trope on an almost weekly basis, although perhaps due to the age of the central characters there's an equal tendency for them to hit supposedly amazing restaurants instead of bars and clubs (see also Improbable Food Budget). It's usually justified as Samantha, who works in PR, is usually promoting the club and is able to get her friends in for the opening.
• Lily Langtry's cub, "The Haven" in Kindred: The Embraced.

Music

• Almost every dance-pop song about partying by anyone, ever, will have a video full of this.

Real Life

• Studio 54. It was so cool it even had a movie made about it, years after it closed.
• CBGB, another New York club, had a reputation as a landmark to punk fans. Unfortunately, it closed down after thirty years in 2007. CBGB was a squalid dive rather than a cool club, but this is punk we're talking about, so squalid = cool.
  • Same goes for London's Slimelight, the longest running alternative/goth/cyber club: It looks like a dingy warehouse, its dimly lit and everything appears worn down but it sets the atmosphere perfectly.
• Other famous nightclubs include Space, Amnesia, Pacha (all Ibiza), Watergate, Berghain (both Berlin), Fabric, The End, the Ministry of Sound (all London), Womb (Tokyo), D-Edge (Sao Paulo).
• Manchester has the Warehouse Project, the largest club in Europe, built from a converted World War II air raid shelter. During the "Madchester" scene, it also had the ridiculously famous Hacienda.

Tabletop Games

• Polyhymnia in Transhuman Space. It's so exclusive that it doesn't have a Wannabe Line, because the Wannabes never know where it is. It's constantly moving, and constantly changing who it's aimed at, but clever memetics ensure that the "right" people get drawn to it seemingly by coincidence.

Video Games

• The clubs in 2027 are where you gain the majority of your missions.
• Afterlife in Mass Effect 2 isn't particularly big or glamorous and because of the game engines limitations neither very crowded nor is the line outside very long (but it does have one, including people complaining to the bouncers), but it's probably the Coolest Club In Video Games Ever. It's in fact so cool that the big crime boss of the sector has her office on a balcony over the main floor where she receives visitors surrounded by her enforcers and hitmen. Since the entire decor is very industrial and low tech, lots of people keep repeating that someone should build that place for real, including the game's creators.
  • Afterlife is fairly exclusive, but it's peanuts to its VIP section, which even Commander Shepard can't get in, even considering that she knows Aria herself. In this case, the VIP section's relatively few customers and small space makes sense, as it is extremely exclusive.
• The Hive in Deus Ex Human Revolution which isn't very big but is apparently the go to place in Hengsha with even the city elite visiting it in the slums. Oh and if you don't have a pass it costs 1000 credits to get in, each time. For reference 5000 credits was used to pay off a years worth of debts in a sidequest found in The Hive.
• Club Errera in Halo: Reach. As a an Easter Egg, you can find a hidden switch and start up a Covenant dance party.

Webcomics

• Sheila's bar in Bard.
• The Cerberus Dance Club in Wapsi Square is a rather cool place. Especially for Minnesota.

Western Animation

• One episode of MTV's Downtown featured the local dive under Alex's apartment being turned into a massively trendy, popular club. Chaka is thrilled, especially since it turns out she can sneak in through the back from within the apartment building. Alex, who has to sleep above the pounding techno music, is less so.
• Spoofed in an episode of Mission Hill. Frustrated at the real Coolest Club Ever, Andy and his friends engineer a fake club and refuse to let in anybody who isn't in on the gag, word of mouth to turning IT into the Coolest Club Ever. Then they claim the place was destroyed by fire, causing everyone who didn't go to talk about it wistfully.
• An episode of Family Guy featured Stewie converting Brian and Frank Sinatra Jr.'s old big band bar into one of these as "pLace" ("Little 'p', big 'l'"). But eventually Brian and Frank changed it back, after realizing they hated the new direction.