I wanted to tell someone about this, but there is no one, so I'm bothering you guys. Ignore me if you want.
I usually watch Criminal minds on CBS but a recent episode had an extra reason for doing so. The producers set the cases in cities all over the country. This one was a about a murder in Yakima Washington. That alone wouldn't be noteworthy or worth writing about, but the accuracy and care the producers used was outstanding.
Some of the things they did that were completely accurate:
The story was about a prostitute who'd been kidnapped. The mention of "Most arrests for prostitution happen on N. 1st Street." Very true.
City names where some of the murdered girls (turned out to be double digits number of victims) were from were local real cities, and were pronounced correctly.
An aerial view of "Yakima" showed areas that clearly looked like orchards and fields.
Mention of a Federal Correctional Facility at Seatac - is a real place.
They did use a fictitious name for the creek where the victims had been buried which is understandable. The look of the area, however, where they filmed it was DEAD ON accurate. While I suspect this was somewhere near Los Angeles, it looked exactly like rural parts of Yakima county.
Most important - to me - was their use in multiple shots of the rounded, bare ridges that define this area. The trees along the creek looked like the kinds you would see here - not an evergreen in site!! The ridges, both seen close up near the creek, behind houses and in the distance as they sped down a highway, could have been Ahtanum or Yakima Ridge.
When the girl was running through the corn field, and yes we grow lots of corn around here, it could have been anywhere in the lower Yakima Valley with Toppenish Ridge, or Rattlesnake hills in the background. Like I said, I'm assuming this was filmed in California and just as important as what they put in, is what they left out. No palm trees popping up in the background either. The one time there might have been a palm in the picture, it was blurred enough it was impossible to tell. The one time I saw leaves on a tree clearly it looked exactly like the ones I have in my front yard.
There was mention of the Green River killer, and while that's over a 100 miles from here, it's the case that made the news that many people would associate with Washington. It's not uncommon for this show to mention real national heinous crimes that fit into their story-line. It would have been weird if they hadn't mentioned Green River.
When talking about the background of potential bad guys, or victims they had them be owners of a farm supply store; raiser of horses and grain-fed beef; apple orchard (that went out of business); and farmer that raised corn. All things very much from around here. The only thing better would have been if they'd used a hop grower ;)
The bad guy killed himself by going into a silo, opening the hatch and suffocating himself in corn. A very "farm" type of demise.
I found it very refreshing that they took the time to get it right. I assume that they do this same kind of careful research all the time, so other episodes set in other locales are just as accurate.
Many years ago I watched an episode of X-Files ostensibly set in eastern Washington. They used real road numbers from the area but they didn't intersect even though the agents sat at the "intersection". But more galling were the thick evergreen trees though which they were driving in eastern Washington. Wet, green, thick evergreens in the middle of a desert! Of course X-Files was primarily filmed near Vancouver BC so their options for getting it right were limited. I didn't usually watch X-Files so that made that one doubly disappointing.