Mindhunter – 2 seasons [2017-]

⭐8.6

Description: Two FBI agents, fighting the departmental stigma of backroom boys – those who try to complicate the status quo of simple Means, Motive, Opportunity (MMO) of crime-solving with academics – work to develop an innovative investigative field incorporating psychology, anthropology and sociology as a method to reveal the motive. They acknowledge classic crime-solving – MMO – as no longer sufficient because criminality is becoming more complicated as Motive graduates from need and greed to inexplicable and irrational reasons. They theorize applying deeper psychological evaluation will posit new questions. Simply, asking Why will lead to the Who. This series focuses on the development by two men, two agents, of a new criminal field and does so through story lines of visiting the sociopathic mind.

Creator: Joe Penhall

Stars: Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, Anna Torv

Taglines: History. Pattern. Profile.

Trivia

  • The interview scenes are based upon the actual interviews with said serial killers, sometimes almost word for word.
  • The characters Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) are based on real life FBI profilers John Douglas and Robert K. Ressler, who pioneered the field of criminal profiling in the 1970s.
  • Based on the true crime book “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit”, written by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
  • The show is based on the real-life experiences of John Douglas, a special agent who pioneered the practice of psychological profiling during his 25 years with the FBI.
  • Kazu Hiro and his prosthetics makeup team spent six hours working on actors Oliver Cooper and Damon Herriman for their respective roles as David Berkowitz and Charles Manson, so that when they walked onto the set they were the very embodiment of their real-life characters. Hiro had earlier won the Oscar for his transformation of Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in the biopic Darkest Hour (2017).
  • While listing off infamous killers they could interview, one of the detectives mentions the killer Herbert Mullin, who was murdering people at the time in Santa Cruz, as was Ed Kemper, one of the main characters in this series. The two of them reigned terror on Santa Cruz for years, police believed at the time that it was only one person committing all the murders. When police arrested Mullin, after he shot an old man in the middle of the street in front of multiple witnesses, the police thought they had caught the one and only killer. 3 months later Edmund Kemper came forward and confessed his murders.
  • Anna Torv’s Dr. Wendy Carr is based on Ann Burgess, a certified psychiatric clinical nurse and specialist in assessing and treating trauma in rape victims. Latterly associated with FBI agents John Douglas and Robert K. Ressler in the Behavioral Science Unit devoted to the development of psychological profiling for serial killers.
  • Shot using a customized, one-of-a-kind version of the RED Epic Dragon built specifically for David Fincher, called the RED Xenomorph. Fincher directed Alien³ (1992), from which the camera’s title gets its name.

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