Mindhunter Review: How's your mom?

Mindhunter isn't the exactly the best police procedural I've ever seen. It isn't even the best new show this year ( The Keepers). But nevertheless I INHALED it. Horked it all down in less than 48 hours. Would you have enjoyed David Fincher's Zodiac if it was 10 hours long? Because that's exactly what it is even though it covers several more killers.

This is a meatball sub. You know what's in it but that doesn't mean it can't surprise you. The bread is a garlic baguette made fresh that morning, the meatballs are grass fed beef, and the red sauce is a Sicilian family secret centuries old. Nothing here is going to win any awards but I could watch this show once a week for the rest of my life. You know... if there was a new one each week.


This is meant to be a deep dive into the dawn of behavioral science in law enforcement but it shines as a nickel tour of American serial killers time forgot. Ed Kemper, Jerry Brudos, and even Monte Rissell get... justice doesn't feel like the right word. Great performances at any rate. If you love true crime like I do, you're gonna get a kick out of the many interview segments that break up the character drama. Which is sadly the weakest link.

It's not a deal breaker but it does feel like filler compared to how electric the procedural elements end up being. Holden Ford ( the hundredth character based on John E. Douglas) is a teacher at Quantico who is deeply frustrated by why motiveless spree killings keep happening. He teams up with the older Bill Tench as they go on the road teaching various police stations about "sequence killing" by day and interviewing a murderer's row of... murderers by night.

Their personal relationships needed more work. Johnathan Groff just isn't as talented as his girlfriend Hannah Gross. She kinda acts circles around him and you wonder why she keeps putting up with his stodgy self centered BS. Not that Groff is "bad" he really shines during interrogations. But during the relationship scenes he is just so devastatingly charmless.

Anna Torv eventually gets on board as the basement crew's psychologist/M. and I'm stunned why she doesn't get more work. She's perfect for film noire and Fincher's low key baroque style is a wonderful fit. It's honestly a shame we don't see more of Tench's and her personal life. I found his adoptive parent situation and her dilemma of leaving her professorship to start over much more interesting than Ford's flailing attempts at romance.

To be fair their relationship arc is pretty great.

But ultimately it's the meatballs that make or break this sandwich and the mystery vignettes are spectacular. One is a hunt, the other a he said/she said clusterf*&k that tears a small town apart and one more involving a elementary school principle that is something that should win a writing Emmy. It won't but I'd vote for it. They hammer home just how radical this method of getting into killers heads, empathizing with them, and predicting what they'll do next seemed to people at the time. Killers were born killers. Nothing you could do about it.

There's a great running gag with a beat cop who waits for the road school to be over and comes up to them before they leave and says "so there's this one guy..." There were always one or two cops that saw truly horrific killers slip through the cracks in their methods. Without guys like that, Douglas's research may never have been proven right and so many more killers may have gotten away with  higher body counts. Mindhunters shows how effective cooperation can be and never talks down to the locals.

Lastly, my favorite point the show makes is something I've noticed over the past year or so devouring true crime podcasts and reading The Man with the Candy. It's that scant few serial killers are actually "born" that way. Most suffered incredible kinds of abuse physical or otherwise. Most had absent parents or were never listened to when they cried for help in their own way. They aren't Hannibal Lector, in fact most are fairly dim. Sympathy is a strong word for what Mindhunter says they deserve but it makes a fine point in saying that most people haven't been through what they have and they are far more pathetic than popular fiction would have you believe.

The dialogue may be overwrought at times and it's relationships a little soapy. Yet I found this show impeccably researched and refreshingly honest. The only huge knock I have against it is the foreshadowing of BTK. He's teased in 8 of the episodes, mostly before the opening credits for only 10 seconds. They treat him like the season's big bad but he doesn't get caught until 2005. If they did some day in the life stuff with him, great. But there's barely any of that. So there you go. An occasionally gripping true crime drama with a sub plot involving a creepy home security installer that goes nowhere. Enjoy!

FringeDivision4Life.