Season one of Netflix’s Mindhunter should have been like catnip to me. Visually styled by David Fincher, director of my second-favourite movie, Se7en, and based on more or less the same foundation as my favourite movie, Manhunter, it should have been a slam dunk for my heart and brain’s allegiances.
But it wasn’t. There was a variety of reasons for that.
It was supposedly based on the creation of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s, in which various agents and psychiatrists went around interviewing ‘serial killers’ – a name they themselves invented – to find out what motivated them and apply that knowledge and psychological science to track down those still at large. Nevertheless, its three main characters were all fictional – composites of real people who worked for the BSU, for sure, but nonetheless characters going through sometimes fictional, sometime real situations. As a biopic or piece of history-telling, that meant Mindhunter lost a little in the telling.
Similarly, it was frequently just a lot of talking, with young go-getter special agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), old hand Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychiatrist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) going to prisons and chatting with serial killers, and having to deal with office politics and their own issues – rather than actual serial killer-catching. Admittedly, that talking could be truly electric in Fincher’s hands, with Cameron Britton’s Edmund Emil Kemper III a genuinely terrifying presence, despite his only ever talking.
Nevertheless, ten episodes of talking isn’t necessarily the best TV crime viewing.
And lastly, the big issue for me was it was very obviously, very deliberately intended to be a multi-season story, with very little resolved in the first season. In particular, every episode featured the same serial killer going about his daily life, in a narrative that in no way connected with the rest of the story.
I ended up concluding:
Combined with its next season, Mindhunter may eventually be seen as a true classic of prestige television; on its own, the first season is more like a drama-documentary with excellent production values, in which we learn how psychological profiling might have evolved.
Now here’s season 2. So is it a true classic?
Not yet. Maybe with season 3. But we can talk about season 2 with a few spoilers after the jump.
