Recognizing prestige television is to know it when you see it. In an era in which the market is saturated with a never-ending glut of content coated with the veneer (and marketing power) of a prestige television show, you can feel whether you’re actually watching a truly exquisite piece of TV in your bones. It doesn’t just have the backing of a big studio or streaming service or budget. It doesn’t just have something to say, or shock value, or enough content to ignite millions of water-cooler conversations around the world. It doesn’t even have to be art (I’m looking at you, Game of Thrones, because everyone’s entitled to a controversial opinion about pop culture every now and again).
Ever since my first glimpses into the world of prestige TV (thank you, Alan Ball, for the five-season masterpiece Six Feet Under), I’ve just known it when I’ve seen it. Everything from Golden Age antihero fare (like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Sex and the City) to new entrants like Apple Cider Vinegar and Black Bird. I’d like to think this means that I also know when something great was nixed too soon. Though some might argue otherwise, when I think of prestige dramas that fall within this category, only one springs immediately to the forefront — Netflix’s (and more importantly, auteur and director David Fincher’s) slow burn of a psychological thriller, Mindhunter.
‘Mindhunter’ Questions What Separates Good From Evil
Simply put, Mindhunter is a modern masterpiece. Set in the 1970s and based on the book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, co-written by (and a deep dive into the career of) true-life FBI profiler John C. Douglas, the series follows Douglas’ fictive alter ego, Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) — and through his eyes, the origin story of the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and the field of criminal profiling.
Alongside Holden are his colleagues Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), a hard-boiled federal agent and father desperate to hold his family together, and Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a scholar in the study of psychology and a closeted lesbian. Once assembled, the trio embarks on the mission of understanding what makes serial killers tick. Over the course of 19 episodes, they also begin to understand that what separates deviance from conventionality isn’t as clear-cut as they once thought.
The true heart of the show lies with its stellar cast. Holden’s ever-growing confidence as he becomes a trailblazing expert in criminal psychology also serves as a veneer for his anxieties about his identity as a person. Tench comes off as having an impenetrable exterior, but the more depravity he witnesses while speaking with serial killers, the more shaky his sense of the suburban utopia of his home life becomes. The understated, cool affect Torv imbues in Wendy belies an abject fear of being outed; she compartmentalizes herself the same way she taxonomizes the aberrant behaviors of her subjects.
And then there are the actors who must live up to the personas of the psychopaths and sociopaths they’re meant to portray; the show’s true standout is Cameron Britton as serial killer Ed Kemper, whose mild-mannered affect and high intelligence are so intriguing to Holden that it nearly begets a twisted form of friendship.
In addition to the sensational performances of its cast, Mindhunter is truly David Fincher at his best. Using a color palette of burnt siennas and toned-down oranges and greens to evoke the aesthetic of the decade, the Zodiac director casts his scenes in a washed-out yet shadowed pall, emphasizing that darkness is brimming underneath the landscapes — and people — that our characters encounter. It also evokes a sense of blurred lines, a visible manifestation of the following questions: What separates the reality of the physical world from the fantasies, however dark, that exist within our minds? And how different are humans from monsters?
What Made Netflix’s 2-Season Show ‘Mindhunter’ Truly Great
What truly launches the show into the pantheon of greatness is the ever-present sense of tension in Mindhunter. Whether it’s an obvious undercurrent during interviews with infamous serial killers or in ostensibly domestic moments that present themselves as innocuous and ordinary, there’s a permeating feeling of gripping disquietude.
When Wendy finds that the stray cat in her apartment complex has left the can of tuna she normally feeds it untouched and filled with maggots, does it mean the cat has simply left the premises, or is the victim of someone else’s unhinged, violent fantasy? When Holden experiments with light kink in the bedroom with his girlfriend, grad student Debbie (Hannah Gross), is it merely sexual exploration, or a way for Holden to try and understand the psyches of his interview subjects?
Are these instances meant to be taken at face value, or do they have sinister underpinnings? The presence of this psychological (and narrative) terseness gives us an uneasiness, a sense of unmoored discordance. Is what we’ve always been sure of truly as safe as we think it is? And if it isn’t, how swiftly can it deconstruct our own sense of our social order, or the very world we exist in?
There’s a very good chance we’ll never get a true answer to these more existential questions. After its unexplained cancellation in 2019, the outcry from fans was (and continues to be) so big that David Fincher himself had to publicly confirm that we will never see another season. But it’s that very fact which might be the reason why those who love Mindhunter will always be obsessed with it. As the very title of the show suggests, we’ll always be feverishly scouring the depths for why we are the way we are.
- Release Date
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2017 – 2019
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Joe Penhall
- Directors
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David Fincher, Carl Franklin, Andrew Dominik, Andrew Douglas, Asif Kapadia, Tobias Lindholm
- Writers
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Joe Penhall, Jennifer Haley, Joshua Donen, Courtenay Miles, Carly Wray, Pamela Cederquist