Dear Covert Affairs...

I like you.

As with any show airing on USA this time of year--or really, any time of year, I guess--I'm not sure you're actually a good show, per se. But like most shows on USA, you're a fun show. "The girl next door is the CIA's newest secret agent!" That's a great tag line. And one I hear on the radio every ten minutes, so if you get cancelled, you can't say it was because of a lack of promotion.

And hey, I really appreciate you jump starting the career of Piper Perabo, who I've always dug and figured was destined for better things after Coyote Ugly and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, but it didn't really turn out that way. In fact, the whole cast is ridiculously good. Peter Gallagher, Kari Matchett, Christopher Gorham, Anne Dudek...your cup runneth over.

I do have an issue, though. And it's not like you're the first TV show guilty of this, but you are the most current one, so that's why I'm picking on you.

I understand that you're on USA and that means you have no real budget to speak of. It's not like you're The West Wing, which came to D.C. three or four times a year for location shooting. Toronto is pretty much it for you guys. And for the most part, it's a fine substitute.

I also get that you're written by Hollywood writers who, for all I know, have never been to D.C. or are even able to find it on a map. So we get standard Hollywood stuff like Annie living in Georgetown, which is evidently the only neighborhood in D.C. that Hollywood writers have heard of. Or the somewhat implausible notion that after a long day's work, CIA employees at Langley head all the way into D.C. for happy hour. Because I guess Virginia doesn't have bars.

All that's fine. But look. Crap like this has to stop:

This is from the pilot episode. Annie and Auggie are at the D.C. medical examiner's office and ask an employee to take their photo so they can get his fingerprint on the camera so they can...well, it's not important. What is important is the blatant abuse of green screen technology here. The United States Capitol is not a couple hundred yards away from the D.C. medical examiner's office. (To be honest, I had to look up where the D.C. medical examiner's office actually is, but I knew it wasn't here.) It's not even a couple of hundred yards away from the building on the left side of the photo that's posing as the D.C. medical examiner's office. This is a completely manufactured background.

Now, this isn't about geography. Not entirely. No one expects TV people in Los Angeles to know or care about where stuff in D.C. is and isn't. I mean, I survived a whole season of 24 that featured things like five-minute Metro rides from D.C. to Crystal City, and fancy outdoor dining in a part of the city where there is no dining whatsoever. So this doesn't bother me too much.

No, it's about respect for the audience's intelligence and attention span. And the idea that just because you can fake an image with the Capitol in the background doesn't mean you have to. I mean, we get it. The show's set in and around Washington, D.C. We don't need constant visual reminders.

Wow, the Capitol sure gets around! Thank God, too, because until I saw it there, even with the overhead establishing shot of the city that aired seconds before this scene, I wasn't entirely sure the characters were still in D.C. I thought maybe they'd traveled to Omaha or something.

Then there was the end of last night's episode. Annie's just returned home from overseas. Which means she'd probably fly into Dulles, but let's give the show the benefit of the doubt and assume that she'd landed elsewhere and caught a connecting flight to Reagan-National, which is considerably closer to D.C. Still...

Come on! This view doesn't exist! And it's totally unnecessary! We don't need to see the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in the background to know that she's home! You just told us she was! I guess I should just be glad the Capitol didn't get jammed in there, too.

I know it must be really tempting to manufacture shots of various D.C. landmarks to make up for the fact that you can't afford to film the real things. But at a certain point, it gets distracting. In the very least, can you be a little more creative? There's more to Washington architecture than just the same three or four structures over and over.

Okay, that's it. Enough grousing. Oh, wait, one more complaint. More of a suggestion, really. If you could have more flashback scenes of Piper Perabo running around the beach in a swimsuit, that'd be awesome. The last couple of episodes didn't have them, and frankly, I kind of miss them.