Special Exhibit: MINDHUNTER

Year: (2017-2019)

Seasons: 2

Episodes: 19

Duration: 35-70 minutes

Where to watch: Netflix

A very cinematic filmmaker if there was ever one, David Fincher forever revolutionized the way streaming television is made with his participation in House of Cards, the first ever original series produced for Netflix.

His second collaboration with the platform, Mindhunter, might not have been as pivotal to TV history, but I think it'll pass to be considered the superior of the two products, considering the problematic last few seasons House of Cards had.

Executive-produced by Charlize Theron along with Fincher, Mindhunter adapts the true story of the early days of Criminal Profiling at the FBI, back in the late 70's, when the psychological aspect of crime perpetrators was scoffed at by most authorities. It's directed based on a non-fiction book by John Douglas, where he describes his founding of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI along with his colleague Robert Ressler.

Neither Doglas nor Ressler appear in the series; their roles are instead fictionalized into Holden Ford and Bill Tench, played respectively by Jonathan Groff (Hamilton, Frozen) and Hold McCallany (Fight Club, Alien 3). They're joined by Anna Torv (Fringe) as a psychologist professor who becomes a central part of the Unit.

Ford and Tench spend a large portion of the series interviewing serial, spree and mass murderers (as well as coining those terms), in the hopes of trying to understand the mindset and origins behind their deviant behaviors. Of course, their research is met with skepticism from the go, and they're only able to move forwards because Ford's unconventional methods include being downright insubordinate.

The interviews with the killers, which are without doubt the major draw of the series are taken from recordings and transcriptions of the real ones conducted by the Unit and other researchers, so they're frightfully accurate.

Far from being an uniform ball of insanity, each criminal takes an individual shape. Some are highly intelligent. Some are barely functional (despite considering themselves geniuses). Practically all of them have paraphilias and traumatic childhoods, but they never materialize identically. A few seem to repent, while most are boastful about their killings.

If you have some passing familiarity with famous serial murderers from USA, you'll recognize more than a few of the names they encounter: there's gigantic Ed Kemper (played by a very unsettling Cameron Britton), David Berkowitz aka Son of Sam, Cult Leader Charles Manson and his ex-follower Tex Watson, the successful BTK Strangler (he was uncaught until 2005) and Wayne Williams, the possible perpetrator of most of the Atlanta Child Murders.

A big part of the triumph of the series is due to the impeccable casting and characterization of these infamous felons. They look (and mostly perform) hauntingly similar to the real men, particularly Berkowitz (his prosthetics are obvious but no less impressive) and Richard Speck. Mason, of course, is played by his almost official performer Damon Herriman, who also played him in his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood cameo on the same year.

Something that stroke me as interesting was how relatively tastefully the subject is handled. Despite the gruesomely detailed events described, very little is actually show onscreen. There's some unsettling corpse imagery on the main titles sequence and a brief explosive instance of gore on the tense opening scene, but after that there's only the barest amount of bodies on display. In any case, the series is not for the easily disturbed: they do get into the specifics of some unspeakable acts, and knowing that practically all of them happened in real life makes it worse.

However, much like the researching protagonists, you'll surely learn a lot from these monstrous declarations. As Tench puts it early on: "How do we get ahead of crazy if we don't know how crazy thinks?".

One of the lessons you'll take from this viewing experience, and which will make you think a lot, is that in many cases there are early signs about what these people are capable of doing. Could we improve our ways of detecting them on time to help them or, at the very least, prevent the worst of their carnage?