Quick! What’s your favorite show filmed in NJ? State wants to expand your list.

There's the Bob Dylan biopic; the bonkers Bell Labs sequences of Apple TV’s "Severance;" "Happy Gilmore 2," Adam Sandler’s reprisal of golf’s volatile potty-mouthed prodigy; and "The Whisper Man," an big upcoming Netflix thriller starring living legend Robert De Niro. Not to mention, naturally, the Bruce Springsteen movie.

New Jersey’s film and television production business is booming, and state lawmakers want it to become even bigger.

Last week, Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law new legislation that expands lucrative tax credits for the film and TV industries that have been flocking to produce their movies and shows in New Jersey of late. However, some progressives criticized the additional breaks for corporations at a time when New Jersey families struggling to afford their expenses could use more help.

State Sen. Raj Mukherji, a Jersey City Democrat, was the bill's architect. He said lawmakers are hoping to attract more companies to set up big operations in New Jersey rather than in Hollywood or New York, which also offer lots and lots of tax credits.

“ I think it's fair to say [Hollywood and New York] view us as competition and they should,” Mukherji told Gothamist.

Netflix is already going full on New Jersey. It’s currently turning an old military base in Monmouth County into a vast studio operation. And tax credits for the entertainment industry in the state are not new. In 2018, Murphy signed a law that re-established the program after the Christie administration put it on ice eight years earlier.

Murphy is not afraid to boast about the Garden State as the “birthplace of the motion picture industry.” It was fellow New Jerseyan Thomas Edison who invented the Kinetograph, the world’s first motion picture camera, at his lab in West Orange.

The governor has also been a champion of giving film and TV companies financial incentives. When Netflix broke ground in May on phase one of its $900 million plan to turn the old Fort Monmouth army base into one of its largest studio sites, Murphy said the project “further solidifies New Jersey’s reputation as a global leader in film and television production.”

The bill signed this week pushed the dollar amounts reserved for the tax credits from $150 million to $250 million for 2026. That’s on top of $400 million that lawmakers made available for the program under the discretionary spending bucket. It also expanded the types of expenses that companies can claim to include costs like script creation. And credit bonuses are now available under the new law for companies that hire workers from various parts of the state or market their production as “Made in New Jersey.”

But some progressives lament the expansion of corporate tax breaks amid the state's looming fiscal difficulties. New Jersey is projecting a dip in revenue, and Murphy himself said in December that lawmakers would need to tighten their belts. And that was months before the Trump administration began moving forward with large cuts in federal aid to the state that helps fund billion-dollar programs like Medicaid.

“ This is a budget where there's not a lot of additional funding to go around. Somehow the film tax credit got expanded,” said Peter Chen, a senior analyst with progressive think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective.

The state’s $58.8 billion budget for the next fiscal year finalized this week. It’s Murphy’s final budget before he leaves office at the end of 2025, and it has a $1.5 billion structural deficit, meaning it takes in less revenue than it spends.

And while it spends more on film and TV production, Chen said, spending for other programs like the state’s child tax credit, earned income tax credit, and direct cash assistance for struggling families remained the same.

But Mukherji said he’s confident the move will pay off.

“ You're catalyzing economic growth in our communities, pumping all this ancillary business to local small businesses and the vendors and everything like that. And taxpayers are going to see a return on investment,” he said.

The North Jersey Democrat highlighted what he called a “once in a generation” project currently being finalized with 1888 Studios to develop a 1.5 million-square foot studio in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Mukherji said the bill signed this week raised the tax credit level for the Bayonne project from 35% to 40% “to match the Netflix program” at Fort Monmouth. He expects it to generate “$3 [billion] to $3.5 billion of investment in Hudson County over the next decade.”

“[This is] the only such development of its kind that some of these studios are building anywhere in the world outside of Hollywood,” Mukherji said.

The senator said he could not disclose the Bayonne project's tenants at this time but said it will feature “multiple global brand-name studios.”