Season 1 of Mindhunter became a huge hit mainly due to word-of-mouth as there was really not much advertising of it offline or in the social media. Its brilliance lied in the tense, teasing and many times disturbing exchanges between the two FBI agents and their interviewees as the agents traversed from one prison to the next, hoping to unwrap the layers of the minds of some of the deadliest serial killers in America. In Season 2 the agents continue their work but the interviews are fewer as the majority of the plot takes place in Atlanta where they struggle to find a serial killer who murders children.
Mindhunter moves at a glacial speed, refrains from over-the-top climaxes involving the cops and the criminals and instead shows the frustrating nature of police work where a significant amount of time is spent waiting and interviewing and shuffling through files. It is exactly because of those reasons why it is one of the best shows in Netflix. The bureaucratic hassles and the unyielding supervisors, the racial tensions, the intruding media, etc were all reminiscent of The Wire in its presentation and pace. The subplot about Agent Tench’s son throws open the nurture vs. nature debate as the second season delves into how taxing the work has become for the two protagonists. We also get to see brief snippets of the BTK serial killer in every episode (just like in Season 1) whose machinations are aloof from the main story but still hangs over sinisterly.
If Cameron Britton’s Ed Kemper was the highlight of Season 1 then Season 2’s most anticipated scene was probably the one with Charles Manson (Australian actor Damon Herriman plays Manson in both Mindhunter and Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood). Credit should go as much to the make-up artists as the actors for giving us an almost indistinguishable resemblance of the characters to their real-life counterparts. What I loved about Mindhunter is that the acting is very subdued and down-low which makes it very realistic. The work that the FBI agents do is academic and the dialogues are quite pedagogic and scholarly like you would expect from a group of professors.
Joe Penhall has created the show based on an actual non-fiction crime book written by John E. Douglas who spent decades interviewing mass murderers. David Fincher is one of the producers and directors and his signature is all over Mindhunter if you are familiar with his work like Seven and Zodiac. Jason Hill’s eerie, creepy music is the perfect complement to the plot.
They took two years to make the second season and I suspect they took more than that to make the first. Mindhunter is a brainsport because it is a verbal duel between the FBI agents and the criminals, many of whom show signs of extreme intelligence. Seeing the academic nature of FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit’s work and the steady flow of the plot I presume they are planning for at least 5 seasons not that we are complaining.
