TV Truths

I dumped cable a decade ago, and I haven't had a television in several years. However, I need to confess something: I still watch bad tv. Some nights I pop on my jammies, snap open the laptop, and run right over to Hulu or CBS.com. My dirty little secret is crime shows such as iZombie, Bones, and Criminal Minds. There are a few important truths I've learned by watching these shows, and for the low low price of $19.95 plus shipping and handling, I'm going to share them with you!

1. People often throw dead bodies in the garbage. Garbage collectors should be trained by the police academy because apparently the dumpsters and bins are filled with dead bodies or parts of dead bodies. If the garbage collector doesn't find the dead body first, a drug addict will be dumpster diving, find the dead body, and strip it of any belongings worth anything. That addict will probably have a key piece of information required to solve the murder, and because they pawned the one identifiable piece of information, the cops will track them down, get the important detail, and solve the crime.

Abby Sciuto, goth scientist on NCIS.

2. Attractive women in STEM are quirky creatures. For example, Garcia on Criminal Minds always has glasses that match her shoes. She is interested in bright colors, pens with fuzzy decorations on top, and surfing the dark net. While women on American television are size 2, Garcia gets to be size 12 to 16 because she is a computer geek. In Hollywood this means she's fat and rarely dates. When she did have a boyfriend, he was a bumbling (and adorable) nerd. Hollywood dressers don't even know what to do with a woman over the size 4, which is why you won't find her clothing in the plus section of any store. 

3. Bugs are very precise. If you have the right kind of investigator on your team, one maggot on a body can pinpoint the exact moment someone died, what they were eating, where they were eating it, and the color of the paint in the room the meal was cooked.

4. My computer sucks. The cops can take horrible black and white VHS tape footage from five blocks away and enhance the image to see what color someone's eyes are and what the last four digits of their social security number (just because they were thinking of those numbers while looking in the direction of the camera). My computer can barely handle having two web browsers, Word, and Excel open simultaneously, and even with a high def monitor I can't clearly view the reflection of someone's great grandmother in a scan of a photocopy of a newspaper article from 1987.

TV serial killers never go after women in these pajamas.

5. Wearing lingerie will get you killed. Women who die at nighttime in crime shows are always wearing skimpy lingerie so their almost naked bodies can be drenched with blood and draped over a pretty bedspread. I generally hope that I don't know the people that particular aesthetic was created for. I wear old sweat pants and a Hello Kitty night shirt as a safety precaution. My next pajama purchase will be one of Sophia's house dresses from Golden Girls.

6. TV characters like to clean. People either keep spotless apartments or absolute pig sty. Usually poor people and criminals are the messy ones. I'm not sure what having a clean living room and a messy bedroom says about my likelihood of being killed by a television serial killer, though.

7. Dead bodies are always burned to a crisp on the nights I choose to eat meat while watching tv. I decuded this fact by the realization that whenever there is burned animal flesh on my plate there is a burned body on the screen. My dinner generally gets thrown out of put away on those nights. One day I'll remember to not watch Bones on a night that I ordered BBQ for delivery.

8. The cops always find the criminal. This came as a surprise to me because when my house was burglarized the cop took a fingerprint and then said that we won't ever know anything.  He was right. We never found out anything. However, I know that's unusual because with half a fingerprint and a full team of forensic scientists on the case they could have pinpointed the thief's background so far back that we'd have known what their mom was wearing during conception.

Dr. Meghan Hunt, medical examiner, only wears designer shoes.

9. I am a terrible runner because I wear flats.  Only women in 5" heels can properly stand all day analyzing a criminal's behaviors then chase a bad guy down a wet alley filled with potholes. I stupidly wear comfortable, rubber soled shoes and will thus never be able to chase killers down. Besides, high heels are far more practical for viewing crime scenes because they leave smaller footprints at the scene.

8. Overweight women are neurotic psycopaths. If a woman commits serial killings it is because she was crazy, and her crazy episodes began as a direct response to a more beautiful woman getting the man she loves. There have been some episodes when the man actually loved the larger woman, but her neurosis led to such fevered pitches of jealousy that she killed because she was sure that an attractive man could never love an ugly fat girl like her.

9. Only the "good guys" can shoot. Bad guys can't even hit a truck that's right in front of them, but the cops can hit the bad guy around a corner without even looking. So if you're planning on learning how to shoot, learn it from the cops.