4 out of 5

Created by: Jeff Davis

covers seasons 1 – 16

I started my dedicated media years as a movies-only type. Sure, I’d watched TV as a wee lad, and would later maintain an artful collection of tasteful gems from that time, or that I’d “discovered” along the way, but I pish-poshed the popcorn nature of the medium as mostly dispensable, and felt that my time was better used watching Motorama and the like.

The landscape changed with streaming, of course, but most directly, it was probably Breaking Bad that told me TV could be a pretty big deal, and that shifted my approach such that by the time streaming was de facto… I was / am a television junkie, and movies take a back seat. While I still can’t quite broach reality TV, I’ve got an internal lecture series on the value of both prized stuff like BB, but also those reliable popcorn types like Law and Order.

That last series (and / or its octopus list of sister series) is maybe a good representation of a particular type of show, though: those that have been on forever. And though I’ve poked at L&O, most of these things, when I try them out, still get some side-eye from me. Though I do understand the appeal of most them, their formulaicness lends itself to some genre indulgences that they all seem to share, and that maybe irk me. And I’d maybe lumped the long-running Criminal Minds in as part of a ring of CSI-adjacent crime procedurals.

It… is that, but the way its return was presented on Paramount Plus, alongside encouragement from some trusted TV sources, suggested to me that maybe CM has something different to offer. And… it does that as well.

Admittedly, the bones of it work for any procedural junky who errs towards the violent stuff: The Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI is (in the CM world) made up of these super smart profiler types, each with their own personality quirks, who track down some notably twisted serial killer each and every episode – for the classic 22-episode count up through season 13. As per any formula show, we have some visual quirk to differentiate things, at least for a while; and a reliable and rigorous “way” of approaching and solving the case. For the former, the show runs hard on having the profilers talk us through what happened and we see them visually inserted into the flashback scene, though this technic fades / becomes much less frequent after a bit; for the latter, we start with a briefing room rundown of What Happened, then the team flies to the location, either butts heads with or commands the local coppers, directs the investigation towards some red herrings, then agent X, Y, or Z discovers / realizes something with ten minutes left and there’s a chase or kicking-in of a door and things is solved. Also: open and close each episode with a quote, that often sounds more meaningful than it may actually be.

Yeah, as long as you figure out / find some interesting killers – and the writers certainly do – even a crappy version of this show would probably last. However: rejoice, as Criminal Minds ends up not being crappy.

It goes through phases nibbed from its relative peers, including waves of being rather torture-porny (and often focused on women; even if we “excuse” this as the gender of focus for most serial killers, the fact that the show more often finds plenty of ways to not glorify this as much suggests it never needs to); it plays around with character drama that’s sometimes wholly separate from the main events, toying with becoming soapy (this is, thankfully, very infrequent); and inevitably, as happens with procedurals with 22 episode seasons, we get pretty loosey goosey with logic, even by TV standards.

So what makes this a cut above, no pun intended? Rather simply – it sticks to the point. This could be seen as, essentially, avoidance of those hiccups mentioned above: while the show gives gorehounds enough descriptive and visual dreck, on the whole, the show doesn’t wallow; characters are developed along the way, with relationships forming (or dissolving) as part of more naturalistic, between-cases beats; and though there’s some hand-waiving throughout this entire show – including its super-profiler premise – it maintains a pretty consistent baseline for its detectiving and tech-ing, never “accurate,” necessarily, but rarely swinging totally to the opposite end of the spectrum, either.

And, of course, this all works because of the actors: mainstays Thomas Gibson, Shemar Moore, Matthew Gray Gubler, A. J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness, Paget Brewster, and Joe Mantegna all are extremely well cast, and directed to nail appealing stern / tough / weird etc. archetypes with enough wiggle room for each actor (even as some come and go) to imbue those archetypes with personal and enduring tics. Subplots come and go, but it’s damned consistent otherwise, and I cannot underline enough how much the general avoidance of soap opera dynamics is key to this, alongside the aforementioned tonal middleground the show maintains between reality and irrelevance – it can remain fun but smart enough to feel engaging.

I could do without some of the forced cliffhangers, and the multi-part eps that suddenly try to make one killer seem that much more serious than others. But otherwise, its been fascinating to see the show evolve past some of its late 00s sexism and slanted take on mental health – i.e. killers are never deserving of remorse or our understanding – to double-down on its positive qualities, making its enduring nature feel earned and not just because we like our popcorn TV. …Though it provides that really effectively as well.