Mindhunter, s2 (2019)

I raced through the first two seasons of Mindhunter in less than a week, which is pretty fast for me and a good context for any complaints I might have now. If nothing else the show is entertaining and compelling. I read the book it's based on some time ago when it was much newer, the 1995 true-crime by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker on the origins of criminal profiling, also called Mindhunter. Criminal profiling continues to be controversial, with mixed results. It's been long enough since I read the book that I can't speak to discrepancies very well. I don't remember any character like the hotshot young Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who seems to understand serial killers instinctively well. He's a little unnerving here and also has the usual array of exaggerated powers in our era of superheroes. I don't remember Charles Manson being interviewed in the book, and the Richard Speck we are presented with here is very different from a mid-'90s portrait I saw on one of those Bill Kurtis true-crime shows reporting that estrogen drugs were being smuggled into prisons and Speck was taking them. Across both seasons, Mindhunter teases us with brief scenes of the Kansas-based BTK killer. The obvious suggestion is that he is on his way to becoming an A plot. I thought that would be the second season but instead (even as the show kept teasing BTK) the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981 take over. I do remember that being extensively discussed in the book. The first season of Mindhunter is largely concerned with getting the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit off the ground in the first place, through the work of FBI agents Ford and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) with academic psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). As is often the case with extended TV dramas, Mindhunter is better when it sticks to the subject at hand and not so good when it wanders into the personal lives of its characters. At the same time some of these threads—notably the sense that Tench's adopted 9-year-old son is on the way to his own serial-killer psychosis—are the most compelling. But I think you can see the problem of improbable, convenient coincidence here. Carr is a lesbian in the closet, Ford—well, there's something wrong with Ford. I thought often of the show Dexter, which I've never seen much of but know features a serial killer doing excellent police work, because that's what we seem to have in Ford. Even when Mindhunter does stick to the subject at hand it feels a little puffed up, with Ford taking on and often psychologically breaking down the likes of Speck, Manson, Son of Sam, and other terrible killers with their own trading cards and fan base. But this show is done so well that I couldn't stop watching it, like I said. Reportedly most of the responsibility goes to David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network), who gets an executive producer credit and directed a good many episodes. I hope there's a third season. No one is being very clear about it at the moment.