Inside the Criminal Minds Sets 

Criminal Minds stars, from left: Kirsten Vangsness, Shemar Moore, A. J. Cook, Joe Mantegna, Thomas Gibson, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Matthew Gray Gubler.

’ production designer Vincent Jefferds, “there are permanent sets, then they add an apartment or a parent’s place. The writers write to those sets, and there’s not much more to build.” But while every episode of

begins in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va., every ghoulish crime takes its team of profilers to a different state, a different crime scene and a different UnSub’s (unidentified subject’s) hideout, meaning this show’s designers, artists and construction crews never stop building. Though

is filmed entirely in Los Angeles, “the challenge is to create the feel that you’re in a new place every week.” Here’s how these masters of disaster keep killing it.

The sets that are most familiar to viewers—a large bullpen with adjacent offices e and the private jet in which the BAU team travels—aren’t meant to dazzle. Show creator Mark Gordon, says Jefferds, “didn’t want a high-tech look” for the group’s home bases. Where things take a turn for the imaginative, he explains, is in the dual worlds of location scouting and creating criminals’ “subterranean lairs”: bomb shelters, Civil War ammo dumps, old subway stations, caves, mines, root cellars and “every kind of basement and garage imaginable.” The designers also build a police or sheriff’s station for every new state—and to complete their work, they have exactly eight days per episode. “We have a big art department,” Jefferds confesses.

Due to filming-size demands, “it’s easier to build base­ments, bedrooms, creepy hallways and bathrooms than to find a location and bring a crew there,” Jefferds says. And despite the time the art and location departments spend on the road, when shooting involves a hotel interior they usually have to create that, too: “When we needed a hotel that was supposed to resemble the one in The Shining, it made more economic sense to build it.” As far as larger, filmable spaces, Jefferds and his creative comrades have “gone over every corner of L.A. County.” They drive around looking for show-appropriate spots, and when they see something they like, he says, “we leave a letter, or ask a location guy to knock on the door. We go into the poorest and richest homes, and we’re usually greeted with, ‘Sure, come on in.’ ” And there’s intimate access to government spaces, as well. For a scene depicting the aftermath of a plane crash, for instance, Jefferds and crew were granted the run of an actual aircraft boneyard.

Sometimes even the best-scouted locations won’t work out, and that’s when the team goes into innovative overdrive. Jefferds recalls the filming last year of a story that took place in an old city bank. The bank was to explode, and then they’d need to film the explosion’s aftereffects, with the bank looking blown-apart inside. “We thought we’d found the perfect location at the old Farmers & Merchants Bank building in downtown L.A.,” he says. But at the last minute, “we realized we’d never be able to remove the old glass from its windows”—crucial to achieving the desired “total decimation” effect. Luckily, a design solution presented itself: The team was also working on an auditorium set for another episode that was supposed to be inside a university. “We wound up building an old bank

that auditorium set, and 12 hours after we shot the university episode, that auditorium turned into a bank.”

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