I have a guilty pleasure: dramatized police procedurals.  Love them! I love mystery and witty banter and forensic stuff. I love trying to figure out who did it. And I don’t mean to brag but I’m one heck of an armchair detective. It’s a gift really.

However, being married to a cop has almost ruined it all for me. See, Hubs is a slave to silly things like occupational accuracy and the laws of physics. These shows are painful for him to watch and his pain sucks the marrow out of my enjoyment. As a result, I mostly watch these shows on my own, although occasionally I will put one of them on while Hubs is in the room just so that I can hear him groan and leave the room like he’s about to pass a kidney stone.

Hubs doesn’t know what he’s missing. I learn so much watching these shows. If Hollywood hadn’t had the fantastic notion of chronicling the goings on of abnormally attractive detectives, coroners and lab technicians, I would still be in the dark. I’m passing this knowledge on to you because I’m a giver. Like Typhoid Mary.

Because Hollywood has taught me so much, I’ve split this post into two parts so as not to overwhelm. In the words of Sir Francis Bacon, knowledge is power and too much power given all at once can make your head explode (I added the last part.) Here is the first generous helping of Hollywood knowledge. Use it wisely.

• Coroners and lab technicians spend their days diligently solving crime and apprehending criminals in expensive designer clothes. I thought they mostly did autopsies and processed DNA but I was so wrong. I also had no idea that public servants and government workers made boat loads of cash and had incredible cutting edge tastes in fashion. That is until Hollywood educated me. Now I know that standing on the unforgivingly hard floors of morgues and labs just feels better in stilettos.

• Good looking coroners like to hang out with good-looking detectives. And when they do, hi-jinx and crime solving ensue. I don’t know why Hubs never invites coroners over for dinners and family cookouts. Then again, I don’t think I want Hubs spending all of his time with a hot coroner. Watching Hubs exchange witty banter and solving murders with some good-looking smarty-pants just might make me want to kick a coroner’s @ss. If Hubs is going to take some unarmed chica in impractical shoes to a dangerous crime scene, it’s going to be me.

• Detectives often cry in the interview room while divulging painful personal facts to hardened criminals in order to obtain a confession. This strategy always works, probably because hardened criminals are notoriously empathetic, which makes total sense when you think about the painful childhoods the criminals must have had. What allows this technique to work so well is that criminals hardly ever ask for a lawyer and when they do, the lawyers sit silently in dismay while the detectives manipulate the hardened criminals into a confession. Nobody wants to interrupt a hot, crying detective. It’s just not done. Hubs seems to be ignoring my suggestion that he cry more at work, which might be why he’s not a detective.

• Crime labs investigate every death with the same amount of time and resources. Vagrants who seemingly died of natural causes get the same exhaustive efforts that high-profile murders do. And they are all investigated with state of the art equipment not seen outside of secret squirrel government agencies. Crime labs can be this thorough because they never have a backlog of lab work to catch up on. Nor do they have bureaucrats breathing down their necks about overtime hours and the super fancy hologram machine they used to recreate an image of the vagrant’s butt. This is very good news for the residents of Vegas, New York and Miami, because it means that there is hardly any crime and the city governments have plenty of money. So head on down to City Hall to get your free handout and don’t be afraid to carry it around in an open fanny pack.

*I am kidding. In no way do I condone the use of fanny packs.

 

There you have it. You are half way to earning your Masters in Armchair Detectivery from Hollywood University. You should totally hit the campus pub. You’ve earned it.