Massive Overkill (‘Criminal Minds’)

(pictured above, l to r:  Some Guy, That Guy from Dharma & Greg, A Woman, Mandy Patinkin, and Some Guy)

It’s the Best Worst New Show on Television. 

Okay, I’m really not in any position to make that kind of call.  I relinquished my membership in Viewers for Quality Television a long time ago, and my time with the box is mostly limited to DVDs, some football games, and what’s left of Arrested Development.  But sometimes you just wanna zone out and stare, slack-jawed, at some purty pulsing dots; and that, some Wednesday night around 9PM (Eastern), is how I found what must be the Best Worst New Show on Television.

That’s my blurb, and I’m sticking with it.

The key to the sub-genius of Criminal Minds is its plurality.  The show, created by first-time writer-producer Jeff Davis, “revolves around an elite team of FBI profilers who analyze the country’s most twisted criminal minds, anticipating their next moves before they strike again.” (So says the network’s site, which really needs to employ some exclamation points:  “...before they strike again!  And again!!  And again!!!” makes for more appropriate copy.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

You can hear the pitch as the credits roll:  “It’s like Profiler, but with a whole team of profilers!  Get it?  There’s MORE THAN ONE PROFILER!  And every member of the team will bring something special to the crime scene!”  Like, potentially, Team Member A can put himself in the mind of the killer.  Team Member B is a judo expert.  C is really good at math.  D can reconfigure his body into water so that his twin sister (E) can carry him around in a bucket.  That sort of thing.

Problem is, no one gave any of these profilers anything to bring to the crime scene.  And they all brought potato salad.

There are five profilers – wait, now they’re “behavioral analysts” – and other than their leader (Mandy Patinkin’s very solemn “Special Agent Jason Gideon,” whose superpower is not, unfortunately, the ability to break out into high-pitched vibrato-ridden show tunes) they’re completely interchangeable.

One of them used to be married to a Scientologist on a sitcom.  That’s about as much backstory as we're allowed.

The show is plot-driven, so you’d think that having a few extra hands wouldn’t hurt too much – those Law & Order folk managed to make room among their body count for Ice T – but the braintrust behind Criminal Minds boldly refuses to multitask.  In the first episode I saw, the entire team walked around – as a team!  There’d be extra time added to scenes so, like, everyone could get into the room.

And when they got in there wasn’t enough dialogue for everyone.  So it had to be divvied up.  Like so:

Agent A:  The ransom note is written in crayon...

Agent B:  ...which denotes a tendency towards immaturity...

Agent C:  ...though the color green might represent...

Agent D:  ...a willingness to compromise?

Agent C:  Exactly.

Agent E:  (cough)

In my dream scenario, Criminal Minds would add a new cast member every week; by the time the show was ready to go into syndication, it would have close to one hundred main characters.  Each episode would consist of a single scene during which the cast would enter a room.  The credits would crawl across the bottom of the screen.  The End.

“Quick!  We’re up against a serial killer with 97 distinct personalities!  Who, oh who, could get inside his mind?!”

“Sar-”

“-geant?”

“We’re...”

“your”

“guy...”

“...s.”

It’d be a veritable clown car of forensic psychology.

As weeks have gone by, unfortunately, the CM writing stiffs have figured out that having parallel lines of action – hey! – might be a good way to get everyone speaking complete sentences.  They haven’t stopped fetishizing the quantity issue, though; last Wednesday, when one of the agents was taken hostage... a whole new agent appeared to explain what had happened.  The only difference was that suddenly there was a blonde instead of a brunette.

Of course the packed house isn’t the only thing that makes Criminal Minds such an awful show:  It is also fundamentally and comprehensively inept.  Being unable to develop the 3,267 characters they’ve cast, the show’s creators have decided to focus on the plot... but have resisted coming up with any kind of formula.  There’s just nowhere to hang your hat, and I don’t mean that in some sort of progressive way.  The show just careens along, out of control, like a toddler behind the wheel of a monster truck.  It’s not as proudly clueless as that epitome of Classic Bad TV – Baywatch Nights (Why isn’t this on DVD?!  I’d buy three of every set!) – but it’s close.

There’s a fundamental problem with the concept:  It wants to be a psychological CSI, but its characters have no stuff to handle.  These are behavioral analysts, a team devoted to psychologically figuring out a suspect from clues other people have found; they then should hand their conclusions off to people who, well, know how to use guns.  This wouldn’t work as a show, though, so the profilers actively roll around through crime scenes, dramatically kick down unlocked doors, and do all sorts of things that make you ask your television:  “Um, shouldn’t you let someone else do that?”

Sometimes, like the much-missed Nights, the show just runs... out... of.  Plot.  They catch the killer with ten minutes to go.  So we get a scene where one or more of the analysts “confront” the already shackled baddie.  Sometimes, they actually induce instantaneous psychological breakthroughs.  Once a massive load of unnecessary, distracting character development was clumsily used as punctuation:  Dharma’s Husband had just gotten That Week’s Serial Killer to confess where his victim was (brilliantly, the team – now split in half – had already used other 11th-hour evidence to find and free the victim); turns out the killer had been abused as a child... and so, says Dharma’s Husband, was I.  The End.  Wha?

By God, I love this show.

Here, from a show that’s got a lot of math problems:  A commuter train leaves Washington D.C. at 3pm.  One of its passengers, a behavioral analyst en route to a profiling session, is openly studying classified FBI files.  Also on board?  An unrelated crazy person, his imaginary friend, his psychiatrist, a Bible-and-gun-and-booze-toting businessman, and assorted extras.  Why does the train come to screeching halt?  Oh, right:  Someone completely irrelevant to the story jumps in front of the express to commit suicide.

Presumably so they wouldn't have to watch the show.

More nth-degree fun:  One episode was about a kidnapper who collected sets of twins.  When all five profilers show up to the scene of the abduction to – that’s right – get inside the mind of the killer they found the victim’s twin sister lying on the ground with her eyes closed.  Because she was trying to get inside the mind of the victim.  Are these guys out of their gourds?

It’s a show incapable of managing information.  I’ve been watching it for five episodes and I just learned that The Woman in the above photo is actually Mandy Patinkin’s character’s daughter.  She might also have a name.  They’re working on that one.

The cast is terrible, but you really can’t fault them.  Everyone on the show looks both confused and hungry for dialogue.  Those are the two kinds of reaction shots:  The “What the hell?” and the “Oooo... I get to say something after That Guy stops talking.”  Occasionally, the African-American character looks like he does know what’s going on.  And for that, he deserves an Emmy.

You get a lot of reaction shots, and not just because you have forty thousand people standing around with nothing to do.  The show is filled with random and redundant visuals, canted angles cut-cut-cut-in with different wongo tints applied; it’s a valiant attempt to convince you something is actually happening.  The are endless amounts of “boo” scares.  People run frantically from corpses, just so there’s some sort of action.  One scene had so much expositional dialogue they broke it up not by intercutting with another storyline, but by having a character get up to leave... only to have him sit back down again and listen for another two minutes.

(The show is almost as bad as that last sentence.  Let's move on...)

Dialogue is dotted with presumptuous jargon that’s supposed to prove the show knows something about anything.  Snipers aren’t “snipers;” they’re “LDSK’s” (that’s Long Distance Serial Killers for you layfolk).  Profilees aren’t called suspects, they’re called “unsubs;” after five episodes, I still don’t know why.  And I hope I never do.

Those lines the cast are so desperate to get a hold of?  Try this on for size:  “If he has specialized training, he knows exactly what he’s doing!”  Here’s a useful, gleeful revelation:  “There’s a chance Agent Blier is being tortured – AND I THINK I KNOW HOW!”  And a choice exchange:

“A hundred unsolved murders?”

“That we know of.  There’s more coming in!”

The show actually had the balls to have a character use the phrase “Massive Overkill.”  It’s like you’re supposed to watch this show on two television sets at once.  It’s that bad-good.

There’s one more aspect that seals Criminal Minds’ rep as wonderfully awful entertainment:  It takes itself über-seriously.

Patinkin spends every episode looking like someone just shot his dog.  Shot it, then peed on it.  Possible motivation for his constant, dour distance:  He has to appear on Criminal Minds.  I would hate to be a bottle of scotch anywhere near this man when the week’s pages come through.

But it’s not just him.  It's house policy.  No Smiles Allowed.  This is serious, serious shit with which our behavioral analysts have to deal, and how DARE you even consider making light of it?  There are moments that would – in any other universe – be comical, but here attempts at humor land like soft shit on pavement.  The producers are flirting with some sort of sexual tension between the most junior analyst and the secret computer-hacking sixth member of the team... but their jokey banter comes off more awkward than adolescence.  One episode ended with Agent Q stuck with a bunch of paperwork; one of her co-agents chuckled, sadly, and offered to help.  Ba-dum-dum!

If – if only! – they’d toss in a self-aware gag, one week.  Like:  Agent A turns to Agent B and says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”  And Agent B’s eyes narrow as he gets into the mind of Agent A...

The one truly sad aspect of Criminal Minds is its sadistic streak; there are pathetic amounts of unnecessary violence.  During the train-hostage episode, the central nutcase spent the entire hour with his gun shoved into a pregnant woman’s abdomen.  One episode cut back and forth between one of the agents firing his pistol away during target practice... and a sniper (sorry, LDSK) picking off pedestrians in a park.  The show regularly enjoys toying with its victims, and CBS should be ashamed of the sorry, brutish displays they shove in audiences’ faces every Wednesday night.  The network should know better.

...because the producers never will.  If I had to analyze them, I’d say they embraced sleazy barbarism to overcompensate for other shortcomings.  They’re lashing out, trying to shock us into not noticing how lousy their show is.

Luckily, they’re bad at that, too.

Every week the writers hit their Bartlett’s hard; the first words in any given episode may be,  “Nietzsche once said...”  Over the course of five episodes, I’ve been treated to irrelevant words of wisdom from Einstein, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Mighty Carl Jung.  It’s supposed to set a sort of erudite tone... but it’s hysterically pretentious.  I’m waiting for an ep based around dumpling murders, wherein some dim sum dimwit is passive-aggressively stuffing clues into fortune cookies. 

Here’s how it would open:  It’s a humid night in a dark Chinatown alley.  Steam coughs up from vents, blue moonlight reflects off moistened brickwork.  Somewhere, a dog barks.  The camera slowly cranes down into a dumpster.  Rats scurry thither and yon; we follow one until it pauses in front of the face of a corpse, its pie-hole stuffed with moo goo.  As the rat scurries away, Patinkin’s voice-over kicks in...

“Confucius say...”

Whoops – gotta go.  Overstuffed, incompetent, self-serious:  The best worst new show on television is about to begin.  This week it’s something about a satanic cult, and I bet ol’ Scratch himself will be embarrassed.

tags: cbs  jeff davis  mandy patinkin  criminal minds  

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