By the very nature of its premise, Mindhunter was never going to be a show about action. The series follows FBI agents in the late ‘70s as they interview and analyze imprisoned serial killers to try to codify a process for criminal profiling. By the time our protagonists enter the story, the murders have already taken…
There was a cold, formal quality to Netflix’s Mindhunter, which was both expected—David Fincher helped set the tone—and wholly appropriate, what with the show centering around measured, clinical conversations between FBI agents and serial killers. There was something satisfyingly jarring, then, about the finale, which…
The year is winding down and the weather is getting colder, so people around the country are opting to stay indoors to snuggle up with a partner and binge whatever Netflix show is dominating the zeitgeist, or simply using Netflix bingeing as not-so-veiled innuendo for getting into other activities. Whatever the case,…
The new Netflix drama Mindhunter explores the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, as investigators interview imprisoned serial killers in an effort to understand their motivations. In the video above, star Holt McCallany explains how the show tries not to glorify or romanticize serial killers, instead…
Netflix’s new drama Mindhunter explores the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, as investigators interview imprisoned serial killers in an effort to understand their motivations. As is common for Netflix shows, Mindhunter seems to breed endless discussion and debate. The A.V. Club recently sat down with…
Netflix’s new drama Mindhunter explores the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit as investigators interview imprisoned serial killers in an effort to understand their motivations and the way they think. The A.V. Club recently sat down with stars Holt McCallany, Anna Torv, and Jonathan Groff to discuss the…
The final episode of Mindhunter’s first season depicts a pyrrhic victory. Holden Ford, the Behavior Science Unit’s boy wonder, gets a confession out of a man who raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl and becomes a media sensation overnight. But the fallout from both the attention the case brings on the BSU and the…
For the Behavioral Science Unit, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 1 shows the team operating at the peak of their powers, working in in tandem to create the term for which they’ll go down in history: “serial killer.” It also depicts faultlines forming…
For Mindhunter to succeed, its investigations have to be successful too. That doesn’t mean Holden, Bill, and Wendy need to solve every case or understand every unique pathology they encounter. It simply means that the temperament and technique that help them produce their best work — the blend of curiosity,…
It had to happen sooner or later: The Mindhunter monster squad finally found a killer they can’t stand.
And now, an episode of Mindhunter in which our heroes blow it.
The late great Halt And Catch Fire famously took a while to actually become great. It got there because its writers figured out a new way to create personal and professional dilemmas for its characters. Rather than present black-and-white choices in which someone was clearly in the right and someone else in the wrong,…
Twitter is a portal straight into hell, but every so often a li’l angel of insight manages to spread its wings and fly out of its maw. So I offer a sincere thank you to the twitter user who put into words something I might not have been able to put my finger on otherwise: The more like a procedural Mindhunter becomes,…
Two out of three episodes of Mindhunter have begun with brief, decontextualized scenes starring the man who will become the infamous BTK Killer. Two out of three episodes have not concluded or reached a climax so much as just…stopped, at the end of a scene that feels like it could have fallen anywhere within the hour…
Edmund Kemper is not your average pop-culture serial killer. That’s the point. Mindhunter’s second episode may be dogged by many of the same problems as its premiere—we’ll get to that later—but its decision to cast “The Co-Ed Killer” as the Hannibal Lecter to restless FBI Agent Holden Ford’s Clarice Starling is as…
“It’s not like there’s some magical machine that makes identical copies of things.” To its eternal credit, Mad Men got the single worst line of dialogue in the entire series out of the way in its pilot episode. Don Draper’s brief aside about the state of the art in office equipment functions as a gag only from the…
It was three and a half months ago that we first saw a teaser trailer for Mindhunter, David Fincher’s new show about FBI agents who interview imprisoned serial killers in order to get help solving recent murders. (Yes, the guy who wrote the book it’s based on inspired the character of Jack Crawford in all those…
CBS and Criminal Minds have mostly cornered the serial killer-hunting TV show market, but Netflix is about to give them a little competition with Mindhunter. The drama comes from David Fincher and Charlize Theron, and is an adaptation of one of the most important serial killer-related texts, Mind Hunter: Inside The…
According to Looking creator Michael Lannan, his co-executive producer Andrew Haigh always knew who Patrick (Jonathan Groff), their protagonist, would be with at the series’ conclusion. Lannan “wasn’t as sure” but knew the beau in question was a “possibility.” (They “remember this a little bit differently,” Lannan…
One of the things that made HBO’s Looking so watchable was that it was kind of ordinary. It wasn’t a larger than life celebration of the “Gay Lifestyle,” it was just a show detailing the lives of a coterie of young Bay area characters who happen to gay. And it did it in a completely non-ostentatious way.…