???
You and I are watching different shows. The current victim is almost always rescued…the formula is mind-numbingly predictable. Unless, of course…
… you are married to Hotch.
I don’t watch the CSIs so I shan’t comment on them, but Criminal Minds seems very distinct from NCIS. The latter is basically a comedy, while CM is far too dark for my sake. If I want to see stories about naked women being tortured and raped, I’ll pick up the newspapers.
Precisely. I don’t like pain and gore. CM is worse than Law & Order: SVU for its incredibly bleak outlook.
Yeah…I gave it up after I found myself wondering why women being abused was being presented as entertainment.
I also gave up Forensic Files, et al. at the same time.
In it’s initial run CM had a stylistic motif that caught my eye. When the team would present their profile, they would merge into the scene they were describing; so Mandy’s talking in the police briefing room saying about their ‘unsub’ - ‘he will work in an office populated by women’ and the background of police room dissolves into an office with lots of women and a guy looking awkward. Mandy then can literally point to things in this scene as though he were there.
In the form of group therapy called psychodrama this technique is called ‘surplus reality’ and is a powerful way to manage feelings, memories , hopes etc.
This was obviously a writing rather than directorial decision as it was not confined to one episode or one character; it served to tell us that the profilers could get inside the minds of the criminal. (Duh!)
Now, for me, it didn’t work. I thought it was clunky and only reminded me I was watching a tv show. But as a psychodramatist, I liked that a tv show was trying to show that experience so kept watching. The same device is used in Fonda interviewing Tony Curtis in The Boston Strangler and when Christopher Walken ‘sees’ the murder at the bandstand in The Dead Zone. (I’m sure there are others but those stand out for me)
I didn’t mind the relatively high level of ick or the interchangability of the actors, or even that one male member of the team consistently calls a female member of the team ‘Baby Girl’ and no-one bats an eyelid. It just got boring. They stopped the surplus reality scenes a while ago and that seemed to me to be symptomatic of an end of trying to do something different. They set up a spinoff (not shown in the UK yet) which was annoying and distracting, they seemed to be doing one-episode remakes of movies and generally dumbing down a show that wasn’t that cerebral to begin with, so I gave up.
I think it’s a shame - I liked it trying to be different but it’s only a tv show.
MiM
I agree with those who feel that the torture and abuse, most often of women, is very prominent in CM these days. I suspect it’s the flip-side to the dramatic decrease in investigating and figuring stuff out that the team does. I know that it has to be quite difficult to cleverly write who-done-it with a forensic psychology flavor on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, most often now the team just kind of chases people down rather than uses their skills to capture them.
There was one episode that was essentially just Natural Born Killers redone for vapid network tv, so that the team just ended up surrounding the couple in a gas station at the end. How does that warrant an FBI profiling team again?
As a result, I think that they’ve upped the snuff-film aspects because they need the content.
And the formula is that they get to snuff the first victim shown in the show, but the next one taken is usually saved by the team (typically by Shemar Moore) right before she (or he) is offed.