I love the show United States of Tara, partly because it is set just down the road in Overland Park. Most times, the show doesn’t really show anything that is distinctly OP. Until this season, so I’m going to talk about these differences. Diablo Cody totally needs to hire me as a consultant for the show.
First: When Kate is at work she says “Her area code is downtown KC”. There is not a specific area code for downtown. And then she goes to downtown KC alone. No way a teenage girl would go alone. That’s a scary area. And then when she gets there, nothing like it would look like, makes it look not scary.
Second: When Max gets arrested, the officer says “We’re taking him to Johnson county about 20 minutes away in Olathe.” OP is in Johnson County too. And why would he need to specify “20minutes”, there’s no way anyone living here wouldn’t know where it is.
Third: Based on their house and neighborhood, we think they live in Blue Valley. In one episode, Marshall said he didn’t want to have to go to “Mission North, they have gangs” That would be Shawnee Mission, and this is JoCo gangs? really? Naw.
And the part that got me most:
The first time I watched this, Season 2 Episode 5, I noticed the sign says East. Now, if you were to go East from OP, you would be in Missouri. Olathe is West of OP. The road Tara was driving down, looks nothing like 435.
This is what made me want to do this post. When I went to take real pics of the places, I noticed something. The highway sign in the show is the one in Missouri. So, now we have her headed East already in Missouri, so would be heading further into Missouri. No wonder they said she got to the police station 2 hours after he’d been released, she took the very long way.
Left is the highway signs in Missouri and Right is highway signs in Kansas.
Here is a shoot of the road, as you can see here cement barrier between East and West traffic, as to the show had grassy median with trees. Also in the show, the road she was on had only 2 lanes each way. As you can see there are 4 East bound lanes here.
In the show it had the speed limit as 55, on 435 the speed limit is 65.
I’m sure there are more differences, I think I’ll start over with the first season and see what else I can find.
