21 Jump Street|Riverdale High School — Sagan High, Where the Nerds Won

Two undercover cops walk into a school they think they understand and discover, within about ninety seconds, that they do not. Jenko goes for the fist bump and gets a lecture about carbon footprints. Schmidt, who was miserable here in 2005, finds that the version of himself the world once rejected is now the version everyone wants at their party.

That school is Riverdale High, 240 Riverdale Drive, in the sliver of Jefferson Parish they call Old Jefferson, tucked between River Road and the Mississippi levee a few miles upriver from downtown New Orleans. The production took it over in the summer of 2011, when the halls were empty and the buses were parked, and turned it into Sagan High — named, in the script's one flash of sincerity, after Carl Sagan.

Riverdale opened in 1962 as an all-girls school with a Scottish Lassie for a mascot, went coed in 1980, and came through Hurricane Katrina with damage light enough to reopen fast. It is an ordinary suburban Louisiana campus: low brick blocks, covered walkways, a parking lot that bakes. That ordinariness is the point. The comedy only lands because the building looks like every American high school anyone ever hated.

It is still a working public school with students in it, so this is a drive-by or a sidewalk look, not a wander through the halls. Come on a weekend morning when the lot is empty.

Stand at the fence and the joke reverses on you. The place has not changed. The rules inside it did.