3 out of 5

Created by: Joe Penhall

If not for some very compelling acting and the incredibly intriguing subject matter, Mindhunter would be a horrible TV show.

“But,” I hear you counter, “it sounds like it has characters and story, so what else is there?”  Yes, well, that’s not quite what I said.

Mindhunter concerns the beginnings of criminal psychology / profiling in the 70s, focused around the two real-life proxies who spearheaded the concept, and the (also proxied) psychologist who helped them shape their methods into a process.  Now, I haven’t read the book on which this is based, nor have I read too extensively on the actual history, but the very fact that we’re using proxies – by which I mean differently named characters vs. their inspirations – means were expecting some creative liberties; something to turn this into a TV show versus a documentary.  Hints of that are there, such as the cold opens which follow a seemingly unconnected character whom we soon realize is prepping for a kill, and the lingering shots with music stings to indicate tension or contemplation, or the relationship stirrings of our three leads, and how those are affected by work…

Except the cold opens are so ridiculously divorced from the material as to be literal wastes of time (not mentioning that this waste leads into one of the most uninteresting title sequences of recent past, a pseudo-Fincher edit of tape recorders ans dead bodies and such, which subsequently wastes an opportunity to “age” along with the show’s interview techniques); the character development outside of the procedural stuff is either short-sighted, shallow, or off-putting; and the “tension” baiting shots are a complete genre mismatch, only inciting a feeling of frustration when you realize they’re much ado about nothing.

So the fact that the acting is so spot-on and that the topic is so damned interesting as to prop this up to three stars is quite an accomplishment.

Over ten episodes, we follow Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Holden Tench (Holt McCallany), and eventually Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) as they convince their FBI taskmasters of the importance – eventually – of sitting down with the criminal element and trying to understand the Why behind crimes that don’t fit into neat lust or greed classifications.  Which leads them to talk to several of what we would now call serial killers – Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton), Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson) – though at the time, they had no such terminology.  And that’s what’s so compelling in the viewing, and appreciated when the show is painstakingly taking its time to detail how that curiosity pans out during the interviews, and slowly morphs in to interrogation techniques.  Our three leads are excellent at portraying the different personality types that feed into that pursuit, and their interactions with each other – whether it’s Holden’s dogged need to theorize everything, Tench’s need to steer things toward a justice-serving cause, or Carr’s strictly clinical approach – but, as mentioned, the show tumbles when trying to shift that further into subplots with relationships and families.  It’s understood that talking to such disturbed types would take its toll, but the show’s attempts to represent that are faulty: often over-obvious, or, in Holden’s case, annoyingly oblique in that we only really see his annoying side and not much to endear us to him.

There was some expectation with Fincher’s name attached to this project, but whether or not he established the visual style with his first couple directed episodes, the tone – again, outside of the interviews – is baffling.  Shots are held to imply importance, or we’ll have an odd focus to suggest we should be watching the space around the character, but nothing happens.  If I were being favorable, I’d say that’s some meta attempt to wrap in a theme of defying expectations, but there’s nothing much else layered into the story to suggest that.  So it just remains a distraction.

I circle back around to saying that the show is fascinating, and all of my criticisms above apply to the non-bulk of the runtime.  Thankfully, we are entrenched in the fascinating interviews (or discussions about them) most of the time, and that stuff – for anyone with a fledgling interest – is riveting, even if it is just a regurgitation of information you may already know.  But Mindhunter has no sense of “TV.”  No cliffhangers, little character investment, odd editing..  If the second season (which was greenlit right away) can decide upon an identity – docudrama or drama – though I’d prefer the former, possibly that riveting feeling can start to encompass the whole show.