First let me preface this with “I am not writing about some so-called housewives who have a TV show and purport themselves to be real by any definition of the word.”

So, one of my new favorite TV shows is called Criminal Minds. Those of you who know me well will be surprised because I usually eschew “fake” crime shows. I’m more of a First 48 girl, myself, but this show is somehow enjoyable. I also used to love Profiler, which was basically the same premise. Criminal Minds is about a team of FBI Behavior Analisis Unit (BAU) profilers who save the day almost every episode. The writers are smart enough to have them win almost all the time, but still have room for humility. I record the show on our DVR and watch three or four in a row whenever I can.

During a recent marathon, one episode made me laugh right out loud for it’s complete lack of understanding of Orange County and just how we do things here. The storyline went like this “normal middle aged father of three completely loses his mind after the death of his child and starts shooting blond women driving luxury cars, at random locations on Orange County freeways.” Now, wanting to annihilate a snooty lady in her luxury car cutting me off on a freeway is something I can totally relate to, but here’s where it got really funny.

The guy would drive around looking for construction zones on the freeway, and drive through them repeatedly until someone meeting his requirements (snooty blonde in a luxury car), cut him off. He would then follow her and blast her with a sawed off through the window, resulting in her death. Anyone who has lived in Orange County for more than thirty seconds knows there are far too many snooty blonde women in luxury cars out there to necessitate driving through a construction zone repeatedly before one cuts you off. That’s just a result of the socio-economic make up of the OC. Secondly, have they seen the back-up created by these merged lanes?  It would take him hours and hours to drive through repeadtedly and anyone in OC knows that is almost more annoying than getting cut off.  Finally, in order to catch this guy, they closed down all the construction areas that required a lane merge except one. In all of OC. Really? Have they even noticed that construction in OC is occurring on almost every freeway and highway and major thoroughfare in existence in our fair county? AND, how could they have gotten CalTrans to respond in record time, pulling crews and rearranging traffic patterns in a matter of hours? Realizing this is just a TV show with fake FBI members and even with suspension of disbelief, I just cannot buy CalTrans doing anything in a matter of hours, as opposed to the standard matter of weeks.

As testimony to how messed up OC freeways are, the freeway chase scenes were actually shot in Long Beach. Obviously, LA County must have a better relationship with film makers, and also the ability to close down lanes of traffic quickly to facilitate filming, and aprehension of violent but normal looking serial freeway shooters.

However, I’ll grant that this scenario is more interesting than “normal middle aged father of three completely loses his mind driving in OC rush hour on the 405 creeping along at 10 mph” and yeah, that chase scene would be pretty boring, although I’d love to see some CHiPs running along side a car in rush hour to catch the bad guy. But that’s a story for Reno 911.