It's Always Sunny in Miami

The Sunshine State

—Florida's Official Nickname, despite having the highest average rainfall in the country.

The sun's a-shinin', the town's a-bustlin', yes, It's Always Sunny In Miami! When in a show the weather is completely static (except in extreme situations), this trope comes in. In shows with this trope, the current weather almost never changes, and locations with notoriously volatile weather rarely have it affect the plot. Unfortunately for the producers, this is usually seen as the production not having enough money or technology for realistic weather. Yes, It's Always Sunny In Miami! Note: Anyone who believes this has never been to Florida, much less Miami. It rains a little over 60 percent of the time. You have been warned.

Related to It's Always Spring and It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Also a consequence of SoCalization. Not at all related to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Examples of It's Always Sunny in Miami include:

Advertising

• Used in an airline commercial advertising affordable rates to Florida, where some tourists claim "the weather was better yesterday" when a solitary cloud moves in front of the sun for less than a minute.

Anime & Manga

• In One Piece, there's the island of Enies Lobby, also called the "Nightless Island" because, for some reason, it's always sunny, even in the middle of a huge storm.

Comic Books

• Regardless of the medium, it's almost always daytime in Metropolis, whereas it's almost always nighttime in Gotham City. This has a lot to do with when their respective Super Heroes like to do their hero work.
  • To such an extent that Metropolis is lit like Vegas at night and Gotham is overcast during the day. Both characters have commented upon it while visiting each other's cities. Animators in the DCAU once said that there was something inherently wrong in drawing Gotham on a cloudless sky backdrop.
  • Interestingly enough, it's almost always night in Metropolis in Smallville. Director commentary said that establishing day shots of the city always looked horrible and they almost never used them.
  • Played straight with Gotham in Batman Begins, but averted in The Dark Knight, which has many scenes of Gotham (filmed in Chicago) in broad daylight.

Film

• Averted in Key Largo.
• It is almost always sunset in Michael Bay movies.
• According to most movies, California is also sunny and green all the time. Winter can get surprisingly wet and windy for non-natives, especially along the coast where random rainstorms last on and off for days, and it takes until March for most of the plants to stop looking half-dead.
  • Satirized in the Spike Jones song "It Never Rains In Sunny California".
• Averted... sort of, in Get Shorty. The opening is set in Miami, and it's snowing. Everyone complains about it.

Literature

• Parodied in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where it's always Saturday afternoon on Ursa Minor Beta, everywhere except those places which have instead a perpetual early Saturday evening.
  • And beyond that lie the nightclubs.

Live Action TV

• You'll never find a rainy, overcast, or any other kind of day but sunny in the Miami of Burn Notice unless it's important to the plot. In fairness, however, Burn Notice emphatically averts California Doubling and SoCalization, and is actually shot in and around Miami (the main shooting location being Hollywood, Florida, a few miles to the north). If it's sunny on Burn Notice, that means it was actually sunny in Miami on the day they were shooting.
  • A notable aversion is "Center of the Storm," which starts just before a hurricane hits. While the aftermath is sunny, puddles are everywhere.
  • Actually, quite often, it's raining and the camera just doesn't pick it up. Unless you look very carefully.
• Neighbours has a rule that it never rains on Ramsey Street. A behind the scenes special showed that on rainy days outdoor shots are artificially lit to make it look like summer.
  • However, it still rains in Summer Bay. One notable example is in the Hearts Divided DVD, which clearly shows that the rain was a contributing factor in Dani not being able to avoid hitting Kane.
    • And it certainly has a lot of stormy weather. Hasn't significant portions of the town slid into the sea during various tempests (blurry on the details). Usually someone dies.
• Somewhat justified in CSI, seeing as how Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert. Also averted in one episode where a sudden rainstorm catches the team off guard, washing away much of the evidence at the crime scene.
  • Averted again when a humdinger of a thunderstorm takes out a substation, forcing the team to use low-tech methods to solve the Mystery of the Week.
• Subverted in CSI: Miami where the weather's been a plot point several times.
• Averted in Golden Girls, where bad weather is frequently shown and has been a plot point in a couple of episodes.
  • One of the Christmas Episodes ends with it (naturally) snowing.
• It's virtually always sunny in Dexter's Miami.
• Somehow, it's always sunny in the Royal Pains Hamptons. This makes rather less sense than in Miami, although again, semi-justified by the fact that all shooting is actually on-location in the Hamptons (or at least Long Island).

Video Games

• Destroy All Humans! series (although weather changes from city to city, the weather of that city always stays the same)
• Averted in most cRPGs.
• It was always daytime in the original Pokémon Red and Blue games. The next generation fixed this. Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire went back to perpetual daytime, due to some (in retrospect, rather minor) technical problems. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl re-added the time of day feature. Pokémon Black and White retained this in addition to averting It's Always Spring, but that's a different matter entirely.)
• Averted in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The titular city is based on Miami and Key West, and it can rain occasionally. The bridges to the second island are even blocked off due to a hurricane warning.
• The PS 1 generation Final Fantasy games had this problem. Typically the entire world map would be perpetually daylight, except for just one or two spots on the map. So it will always be nighttime in Midgar and Treno. FFIX lampshades this a bit by calling Treno the "Dark City". Other places can become night, but only when the plot demands it. The PlayStation 2 Final Fantasy XII avoids this a bit by throwing in weather cycles in every location, but never a day-night cycle.

Web Comics

• Parodied early in Eight Bit Theater: it is noted that it never gets dark until they go to the inn. This later becomes a plot point where the Light Warriors have a day to prepare for a fight... and Fighter almost immediately goes to an inn.

Western Animation

• It's always snowy in South Park, except for a few weeks in summer.

Real Life

• If you live in a cold and clouded country, hot places become this. What people would view as cold there would be boiling for tourists.
• Rainforests at the equator tend to have the same weather (even down to the same sunset and sunrise times, which is at all parts of the equator,) which is wet, hot and humid all year round. The moonsoon is the exception in some parts. Often its so humid and cloudy that the temperature does not change much in the night either.
• People who live in the Pacific Northwest (Northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia) like to characterize it as either constantly raining or looking like it's about to rain.
  • As do people from Japan, Korea, and to an extent the British Isles (G. K. Chesterton once said it was unpatriotic for an Englishman to dislike rain, since it's always raining in his country).
• Before Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans, stories based in Louisiana rarely showed how severe the weather can get. Sure there'd be rain, but not the hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods that plague the state.