The 7 Worst Fictional Towns In America

Each year various news organizations look at factors like public schools, crime rate and diversity to come up with definitively numbered lists of the best and worst places to live in America. Having grown up in a town that's one of the best is obviously bad news because it proves that contrary to all that, "Man if I could only get out of this place" talk during high school, the problem was you. If, however, you were in the enviable spot of growing up in one of the bottom feeders, well, you can go back to having sex with that microwaved jelly donut because, fuck it, you're a product of your environment.

But even if it turns out your town wasn't the school of hard knocks you'd always thought it was, you still might have an excuse. That's because you probably spent quite a bit of your time in one of these seven towns, many of which are worse than anything they can throw at you in Battle Mountain, NV (The worst town in America according to The Washington Post).

Crime Rate:
At first, Cabot Cove doesn't seem all that bad. It's an idyllic coastal community of only 3,000, so you can't complain about the atmosphere. Also, for a town in the typically unwashed state of Maine, the townsfolk are relatively attractive, consistently looking (and for some reason acting) like they just stepped off the set of a soap opera.

However, none of that changes the fact that if you lived in Cabot Cove from 1984-1996, there was a pretty good chance that someone was going to murder your ass. With a body count of up to eight per episode, Cabot Cove experienced an outbreak of no less than 800 murders during the time that Jessica Fletcher lived there. And the crimes tended to be local on local, meaning that over half of the population was involved in a murder in a twelve year span. (Hear that, Camden, NJ?)

Law Enforcement:

In a small town like Cabot Cove, you'd think that the limited suspect pool would have enabled the cops to solve murders pretty quickly. But time after time, the Cabot Cove PD would arrest the wrong person, falling for clearly planted clues like a suspect's hat being left at the scene of the crime, and ignoring obvious culprits like the guy in the corner laughing maniacally while steepling his bloody fingers.

Sure, Jessica Fletcher would set the cops straight in the end, but not before the cops would tell her to "leave this one up to the professionals." And just imagine what happened when the swinging queen of crime fiction was off on one of her many vacations. (Where people coincidentally were also always getting murdered.) If you live in Cabot Cove, you're either going to commit murder, get murdered, be falsely accused of murder, or you're a shit-stupid cop. Take your pick.

Diversity:
With its uniform blue skin tone, Smurf Village may very well feature the least diverse population of any town in the universe. As for demographic statistics that people outside of college admissions offices care about: the male to female ratio is a cross between the worst keg party you've ever been to and a daycare center in mainland China. And the fact that there's only one female doesn't just suck for the guys either-we'd imagine that every day was about as relaxing as a walk through the prison yard at San Quentin for the perky blond Smurfette. Let's just say she probably had to lock her door when it was closing time at the local bar.

Language:

Commentators have often wondered about the drugs the show's creators must have been on, but when you get down to it, the village was a very conservative, somewhat Fascist environment. Everyone held the same values, everyone used the same language, and with its insistence on substituting "smurf" for every other word, their native tongue may very well have been the most annoying and down right confusing code of communication ever created (Other than Hawaiian. What the fuck's with all the vowels, Hawaii?) In Smurf Village, "My husband's smurfing" could mean anything from "My husband's eating" to "My husband snapped and now he's hunting smurfs!" Unfortunately, there's no way to know because Smurf language is about as clear as a Door's song.

Oh, Also, It's Basically a Cult:
If Papa Smurf had emerged from his house one episode and told everyone that he was actually the reincarnation of Christ, and that they had missed the passing comet they were supposed to catch so all Smurfs had to kill themselves, we're not sure if we would have batted an eyelash.