The series of Highway To Heaven is about a probationary angel and his human friend journeying the Highway To Heaven together and helping people they meet along the way.

But what this Highway To Heaven is, precisely, and where it is remain a mystery.

After almost four seasons, there are enough details to talk about the settings of this Highway To Heaven series.

Before starting, it could be useful to consult the Glossary, the Guidelines and the Assignments, in order to better understand the context of the episodes.

Features:

• The Setting
• Out Of California
• Heaven
• The Front Jobs
• Recycles and more

The Highway To Heaven Setting

The series is presented in many promos as a “Cross-Country” journey. And fictionally, it is the case.

To start with, it is useful to check the character’s background out: Mark is an Oakland native, alongside his sister Leslie (and his unofficial missing brother George).

That’s where Mark spent most of his life, and that’s where he met all the friends he has in the series. Those who walked out on him when he became an alcoholic.

Here’s the complete list of friends introduced so far in the series:

• Charlie (Plane Death), a colleague, he later moved out to “Deter” (a fictional town, probably somewhere between Tuolumne City and Mentryville);
• Wes (The Secret), another colleague, now based in Los Angeles;
• Sam (Change Of Life) yet another colleague, now based in Hollywood;
• Frank (Love And Marriage), fourth colleague, he quit the force at some point after Mark did;
• Luke (Man To Man), introduced as Mark’s childhood friend;
• Gene (A Father’s Faith), a fisherman who moves around all the time;
• Gary (Amazing Man), a colleague trained in Oakland and then moved to L.A.;
• Caz (All The Colors Of The Heart), another colleague trained in Oakland and now running a Summer Camp for Blind Children.

More friends will be added, but nobody seemed able to escape California.

Instead, Mark’s sister Leslie resides in Tucson, Arizona. At least she did in the Pilot.

Over the course of the series, Jonathan and Mark supposedly travel all around the country.

The Pilot is set in Tucson, Arizona, at Leslie’s house.

Jonathan Smith, as Arthur Thompson, lived in Monrovia with his wife Jane.

Immediately after his death, he became a “probationary angel”: he was given a different body (Landon’s) and sent back to Earth to help other people at crossroads in their life.

He meets some “Friends” and angels too:

• Saint Peter (Help Wanted: Angel), a full angel;
• Random Quadriplegic (A Match Made In Heaven), a human friend he met before the Pilot;
• Harold (The Last Assignment), a fellow probationary angel who has been on probation for 200 years;
• Ted (Love At Second Sight), a fellow probationary angel who has been on probation not that long;
• Clifford (A Mother And A Daughter), a full angel who makes “field supervision” to probationary angels and choose who to promote upstairs, though he’s not that good.
• Santa Claus, too many;
• Sychopop (Heaven Nose, Mr. Smith), the angel dispatcher.

In the Pilot, he’s shown walking a lonely road with his convicted felony bag.

And the Pilot concluded the same way.

That implied that Jonathan moved around the country on foot, or hitchhiking along the way.

That was before he met Mark and took possession of his car, a blue Ford LTD II.

After the Pilot, the series moved to California from the second episode To Touch The Moon, and mostly settles there.

In particular, most episodes in every season were shot and set in Los Angeles, with some exceptions.

Out Of Cali: the episode Going Home, Going Home is set in the fictional “Twin Rivers” town in Oklahoma; The Right Thing is set somewhere in Nevada (both episodes where shot in California, though), Song Of The Wild West was shot and produced in Tucson, Arizona.

Season two moves around more frequently: Heaven On Earth takes place in Arivaca, Arizona, while Popcorn, Peanuts And Cracker Jacks in Tucson, as well as To Bind The Wounds. All these episodes where shot on location.

Other episodes set outside Cali but shot in California: Summit, presumably takes place somewhere along the Atlantic Coast; Basinger’s New York from season three and The Smile In The Third Row, both in New York.

And Jonathan Smith Goes To Washington, in the titular city.

Then, season four comes back to Tucson for Why Punish The Children? and A Dream Of Wild Horses; after that, Jonathan and Mark hang around California for the rest of the time.

Now, those places are all quite far from each other, and it’s weird that Jonathan was forced to move on foot before using Mark’s car. But maybe that was part of the assignments too: helping people along the way, not just when he got somewhere.

At the same time, Santa Claus—who apparently is also an angel—seems to travel all over the world on Christmas Eve.

Heaven: that is a big question with no official answer—what Heaven is in the series, and has Jonathan been there.

As for the first question, Heaven is never described in the series in details (except very generally as a “beautiful place” where everyone is happy). It can’t be accessed by any man, when they are still alive. But Jonathan has a special way to get there: just walking.

So, take it as though Heaven is an empty street.

Or an empty Highway, more fittingly.

In the fourth season, there’s one episode in which Jonathan goes to Heaven, and Heaven is shown to the audience too. But the way it appears is most likely a reference to Little House On The Prairie, so it shouldn’t be taken literally.

As for the second question, that’s a mystery: the series doesn’t reveal whether Jonathan has ever been to Heaven after his death, or how he received word that he was going to become a probationary angel. Maybe he just woke up in a different person’s body and realized that he was selected as a probationary angel.

If the question becomes what’s Heaven like in the series, there would be much more to talk about. Details are far and between episodes, but it’s possible to hypothesize that Heaven works in a sort of Hierarchy, where the probationary angels have a lower place than the full angels.

More specifically: Jonathan is a probationary angel, and he has to work his way to Heaven through every assignment completed successfully. (And no wings, definitely.)

But that’s not the only thing to do: angels do seem to have different jobs. For example, Saint Peter is a superior angel who has to oversee that probationary angels do their job fine; Clifford has to do “field supervision” to other angels; then, there are other angels working in Heaven and whose job is giving assignment to the probationary angels on Earth (it’s likely they receive them by their superior, and pass them on).

So, working “assignments” like Jonathan is not the only job an angel can have.

It is then plausible that Jonathan will have to work after the completion of his probation, in some capacity. It would be further confirmed by what happens to other angels in the series: for example, Wally became an angel after his death and seemingly kept working (he visited a sick child after his death), and Harold concluded his probation after 200 years and then remained on Earth and used his powers to win the lottery.

So, that implies that Jonathan will have to work forever. But in one episode (We Have Forever), he longs to go to Heaven and be reunited with his late wife. That implies that Jonathan believes ascending after his probation will lead him to stay in Heaven forever, with no other duty or job. Unless he meant that he just wanted to stay with his wife, even if he had to work other angelic jobs at the same time.

Similarly, the length of his probation is unclear: it should probably last around 40 years, though it seems that conditions may vary upon each probationary angel, and there’s no specific indication.

Either way, what’s clear is that there are no conditions to his probation: he just has to work, that happens to be the way it is. Though he can force his human friend to work too. In the Pilot, it seemed that having an earthly assistant was forbidden, but Jonathan broke this ground and now it has become widely accepted by fellow probationary angels who don’t even question what Mark is doing there with Jonathan. Unless Mark were Jonathan’s assignment: his superior knows that if Mark hadn’t been accepted into this journey he would have come back drinking his life away, so Jonathan’s assignment is working through all his assignments alongside Mark.

One last question: the introduction road.

So, it’s no secret that the introduction of Highway actually combines two different scenes: the first one—the one showing Jonathan walking down the Highway alone right after the clouds panoramic—was shot in Arizona during the Pilot.

However, the moment Jonathan turns around and sees Mark’s car driving to him was shot in California during the production of To Touch The Moon, the second episode of the series.

There are conflicting report on where that is: it’s probably Soledad Canyon Road, but there’s no official confirmation. So, the Highway is just a mystery.

The Front Jobs: Over the course of the series, in order to solve their assignments, Jonathan and Mark are sometimes required to get a specific job. Actually, there seems to be a contradiction here: in the very early episodes of the series, Jonathan just walked up to his employer and tried to prove he was the best man for the job with what he has. Which means he resorted to punchlines.

But then, starting from Catch A Falling Star, he created fake references to get the job easily. And he gave them to Mark too.

The most recurring job in the series are cops and teachers. In detail: they are cops five times (Bless The Boys In Blue season two, For The Love Of Larry Cold Open and Parents’ Day season three, In With The “In” Crowd and Back To Oakland season four), and the same as teachers, whether High School or nursery school (Friends season two, A Night To Remember season three, Why Punish The Children season four, The Silent Bell and The Source season five). More generally, their “angelic” mission is knows as Human development.

Just a fancy name to indicate “playing angels”.

Recycle and More: it’s well established that Landon is a committed recycler; so, when he had the chance, the series went to familiar places presenting them as something they have never been before. In some cases, the setting were directly recycled from the Little House series. And here are some.

In season two, the court in the episode The Monster is the Calaveras County Museum of Calaveras, ofc.

Both the interior and the exterior had already been used in a bunch of Little House episodes as a firm.

Similarly, Man To Man is set up in the mountain of the Donnel Reservation.

Which is the same place as “Jonathan’s mountain” on Little House.

Sometimes, Landon recycled even within Highway: for example, the season one episode A Child Of God was partially shot at Six Flags Magic Mountain. And they revised that place in Man To Man season three.

Similarly, Encino was used as the setting for both Summit and Children’s Children.

One striking case is Westward Beach, also known as Point Zuma beach. It served as the setting for Help Wanted: Angel in season one (they go to two beaches, and one is Westward), The Secret and Keep Smiling in season two, then A Father’s Faith in season three.

And All The Colors Of The Heart in season four.

However, most of the places he went to have long been destroyed: for instance, the episode A Divine Madness in season one was shot at Malibu Castle, which burned down in 2008; similarly, All The Colors Of The Heart was shot up on Camp Bloomfield in the Santa Monica Mountains, and it burned down 31 years later. Some sets just closed down: the episode Hotel Of Dreams was produced at Langham Huntington Hotel, which was closed (though it then reopened); many episodes were shot at the Ambassador Hotel (including Cindy, Whose Trash Is It Anyway?) and it closed down literally one year after the series ended. That’s the most tragic one.

The most striking recycle, though, is the Sierra HWY: Jonathan and Mark went there in For The Love Of Larry, when it was a pet boarding place.

And then came back precisely there in Man’s Best Friend; however, on that occasion, it was turned into a dog shelter. And neither Jonathan or Mark ever seem to remember it was not what it used to be.

That’s the way it is. Evidently Landon had affiliations in the same place.

Finally, there’s a “Beach” curse: in most episodes in which two characters go to a beach something tragic happens. For example, in Help Wanted: Angel when Mark and Stella spent a night at the beach, and she was diagnosed with an incurable disease.

Or in The Secret, when Mark goes to have a waterfront cookout with an old colleague’s family, and brings troubles into their life.

And in A Match Made In Heaven, when Diane asks Scotty to marry her by the beach, and they suffer a nearly mortal accident on the way back.

This will continue in We Have Forever season four and Summer Camp season five.

This was supposed to be a journey discovering the settings of the series. Not much is revealed, at least straightforwardly, but now the Heaven Hierarchy shouldn’t be a mystery anymore. As well as the familiarity in the sets.