Jonathan Groff & Cameron Britton in Mindhunters. Image courtesy of Netflix.
I love Netflix’s Mindhunter. Love it. Let me count the ways (and 1 reason why Season Two wasn’t quite perfect).
Serial killers are compelling. I mean, there is a reason we as a nation love serial killers and true crime stories: they are hard to look away from. The idea that there are some members of society out there who could perpetrate random acts of evil and malice is shocking and scary. And it makes for really compelling television. So tracking the elite FBI unit tasked with getting inside these killers’ heads is a pretty full-proof premise, and the show has great fun with its cast of deplorables. In Season Two Charles Manson even makes an appearance. But the attention to detail the show pays to getting the appearance and the cadence of these real-life psychos right really pays off.
Period Piece. I am a sucker for a good period piece, and the way the interior design of Bill Tench’s home recreates the feelings I used to have going over to by grandparents house just draws me into this show like a moth to a flame. He also kind of reminds me of my grandad. The attention to detail the show takes in recreating a particular sense of time and place really adds an enjoyable layer of texture and helps submerge you in the world it is creating.
Mental chess game. Mindhunter features a lot of talking. A lot. Many of the best scenes are just two FBI agents sitting across from a serial killer at a table talking to one another. You might think this would be boring. You would be wrong. The mental chess games the characters play with one another, trying to gain trust in order to glean some insight, really showcase top-flight writing. They are terribly unrealistic (people don’t talk to each other this way, and it’s surely not how you would conduct a qualitative interview), but as taut little games of mental cat and mouse they excellent.
Mirroring Holden. One of my favorite things about Season One, which doesn’t get as much play in Season Two, is the way in which Holden mirrors the serial killers he is pursuing. Cold, calculating, no social life, no social skills, little empathy, focused, driven, little understanding of how his actions impact others. The show makes the argument that Holden can understand the psyche of serial killers so well, because he is like them. That’s such a fascinating angle to take. And Jonathan Groff, like Dexter, is charming enough that you kind of overlook this fact, which is a fun ambiguity that the show plays around with.
Atlanta. The back half of the season is taken over by the mostly true-life account of how the BSU got involved in hunting a child strangling serial killer in Atlanta during the early 1980s. It raises all sorts of complex issues involving racial politics, class and marginalized communities, all viewed through the prism of this ticking clock to find the killer. But this case also throws into sharp relief the questionable utility of the BSU’s profiling techniques. Some people think this show celebrates FBI profilers as super sleuths, but that’s not the case at all. As this case makes clear, there are serious doubts about the reliability of profiling, and whether Wayne Williams was even the right guy. So the show is, I would say, pretty balanced in its take on profiling even though we are clearly meant to side with the BSU characters and their science of evil most of the time.
So, those are the top 5 reasons I love this show. One thing I wasn’t too keen on….
Personal lives. The show goes deeper into Wendy and Bill’s personal lives in Season Two. In a way this is a clever device because it is contrasted with Holden’s complete lack of any social life whatsoever. The problem is that those subplots are not good. Bill’s is way, way too on the nose - his adopted son is involved in the murder of a toddler. I mean… come on, have the writers never heard of subtly? And Wendy, well sadly she was a casualty of Season Two’s narrative structure. Because Bill and Holden are off in Atlanta for much of the season, and the unit is expanding, there’s just not much for her character to actually do, plot-wise. So she is shunted off into this utterly lifeless lesbian relationship subplot. It’s bad, and she deserves better. And even Holden, to the extent they go into his personal life, they decided to use panic attacks as a plot mechanism, which is one of my least favorite narrative tropes because it’s so lazy and cheap (see: Tony Stark). Just lazy, weak writing all the way round as they tried to flesh out the characters a bit.
Hopefully in Season Three they just stick to what works best: interviewing serial killers and solving crimes with questionable profiling techniques while reveling in all the splendor of 1980s interior decor.
