TMC
02-19-2020, 09:31 PM
...: Why the CBS police procedural was a guilty pleasure
https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/criminal-minds-episodes-where-to-start-cannibal-penelope.html
The CBS crime series that premiered in September 2005 exits tonight after 15 seasons and 324 episodes. Criminal Minds fan Rachelle Hampton explains why the show endured as a guilty pleasure: "The good guys catch the bad guys, and sometimes Shemar Moore is shirtless. That’s the basic premise of CBS’s procedural drama Criminal Minds, which will air its final episode on Wednesday after 15 seasons," she says. "For the past decade and a half, the show has followed a revolving cast of FBI agents as they track down serial killers for the fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit. Buzzier shows like Mindhunter and True Detective and docuseries like Conversations with a Killer or The Keepers have since provided fresher serial killer content, but when Criminal Minds aired in 2005, its concept—a slight remix on the tried-and-true villain of week formula—was relatively unique. Despite it now being part of a rather crowded field, the show has been one of my consistent guilty pleasures over the past 10 years—one whose appeal I have long struggled to explain to others. I started watching Criminal Minds in junior high, before I fully understood the ramifications of cop procedural shows and their tendency to function as propaganda that glosses over the discrimination and brutality that’s baked into law enforcement. And yet even as I grew more familiar with the brokenness of our criminal justice system and the abhorrent history of the FBI, I still found myself turning to Criminal Minds in quiet moments when I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything else. Why do I like this objectively not-great show? The most compelling reason is that, by virtue of focusing on serial killers—one of the whitest subsets of criminals, at least in the public imagination—Criminal Minds made it pretty easy to ignore the racial dynamics that make early episodes of Law & Order so cringey. A less compelling (though probably more honest) reason is that Criminal Minds at its very best is just my kind of formulaic fun, despite the morbidity baked into its premise. When the show attempted season-long arcs or social commentary was when I was most likely to tune out. But episodic case-of-the-week plots—or better yet, the one-two punch of a two-episode arc—hit the perfect sweet spot." ALSO: Matthew Gray Gubler, one of Criminal Minds' last original cast members, says the series finale plants roots for it to "re-hatch" later (https://tvline.com/2020/02/19/criminal-minds-matthew-gray-gubler-series-finale-preview/).
Criminal Minds' final season didn't want to stray far, but a musical episode was briefly considered (https://ew.com/tv/2020/02/19/criminal-minds-series-finale-showrunner-interview/)
The CBS police procedural wrapped up 15 seasons Wednesday night, and showrunner Erica Messer says she and her writers considered some "crazy" out-of-the-box ideas for the 10-episode final season. "Yeah, there was crazy stuff thrown out in the room, and we didn’t just shoot it down," Messer tells EW. "We would say, 'Okay, how could that happen?' The idea of a live episode or… what do you call it?… a documentary film crew following the crew around. We ended up exploring some of those, but ultimately we weren’t able to find a way to keep it true to the series. A musical would just take you so far out, that we just didn’t know if that would be the right way to go or not." Asked about the potential musical episode, Messer adds: "I mean, somebody brought it up for our final 10. 'Do we do a musical?' We were like, how in the world would we do it? And I think the idea was gone by the time we ordered lunch but we did think about it. It’s a classic! You have to think about it for a second, right? But we didn’t want to go too far off the beaten path in the show’s final run. There were a couple of episodes that we thought, 'oh, let’s just make this 100 percent from the unsub’s point of view.' But then you’re never really seeing the team. I mean, we loved the idea. We all sort of rallied around it but then said, 'Wait, this is the final 10 hours of this show. If you have one of those hours where you’re not seeing all of our favorite people on the screen, fans are going to feel like they’re getting cheated out of an hour of our team.' And so while I think that would have been a great idea to do some other season, it didn’t feel like the right time to do it in our finale season. So we took a kernel of that idea and made an episode around that."
ALSO:
Showrunner Erica Messer on filming the final scene (https://www.etonline.com/criminal-minds-boss-on-saying-goodbye-after-15-seasons-with-a-bittersweet-ending-exclusive-141788): "That was a sad night but sadder when watching it than while shooting it, but super sad when they all got in the elevator and the doors closed on them"
Messer says "we had to get down to the nitty-gritty" in deciding which villains to bring back (https://www.tvinsider.com/914902/criminal-minds-series-finale-garcia-note-reid-maeve-rossi-chameleon/)
Messer says it was "really hard" deciding which flashbacks to use in the series finale (https://www.tvguide.com/news/criminal-minds-boss-breaks-down-the-biggest-moments-from-an-explosive-series-finale/)
See the Criminal Minds cast then and now (https://people.com/tv/criminal-minds-cast-then-now/)
https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/criminal-minds-episodes-where-to-start-cannibal-penelope.html
The CBS crime series that premiered in September 2005 exits tonight after 15 seasons and 324 episodes. Criminal Minds fan Rachelle Hampton explains why the show endured as a guilty pleasure: "The good guys catch the bad guys, and sometimes Shemar Moore is shirtless. That’s the basic premise of CBS’s procedural drama Criminal Minds, which will air its final episode on Wednesday after 15 seasons," she says. "For the past decade and a half, the show has followed a revolving cast of FBI agents as they track down serial killers for the fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit. Buzzier shows like Mindhunter and True Detective and docuseries like Conversations with a Killer or The Keepers have since provided fresher serial killer content, but when Criminal Minds aired in 2005, its concept—a slight remix on the tried-and-true villain of week formula—was relatively unique. Despite it now being part of a rather crowded field, the show has been one of my consistent guilty pleasures over the past 10 years—one whose appeal I have long struggled to explain to others. I started watching Criminal Minds in junior high, before I fully understood the ramifications of cop procedural shows and their tendency to function as propaganda that glosses over the discrimination and brutality that’s baked into law enforcement. And yet even as I grew more familiar with the brokenness of our criminal justice system and the abhorrent history of the FBI, I still found myself turning to Criminal Minds in quiet moments when I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything else. Why do I like this objectively not-great show? The most compelling reason is that, by virtue of focusing on serial killers—one of the whitest subsets of criminals, at least in the public imagination—Criminal Minds made it pretty easy to ignore the racial dynamics that make early episodes of Law & Order so cringey. A less compelling (though probably more honest) reason is that Criminal Minds at its very best is just my kind of formulaic fun, despite the morbidity baked into its premise. When the show attempted season-long arcs or social commentary was when I was most likely to tune out. But episodic case-of-the-week plots—or better yet, the one-two punch of a two-episode arc—hit the perfect sweet spot." ALSO: Matthew Gray Gubler, one of Criminal Minds' last original cast members, says the series finale plants roots for it to "re-hatch" later (https://tvline.com/2020/02/19/criminal-minds-matthew-gray-gubler-series-finale-preview/).
Criminal Minds' final season didn't want to stray far, but a musical episode was briefly considered (https://ew.com/tv/2020/02/19/criminal-minds-series-finale-showrunner-interview/)
The CBS police procedural wrapped up 15 seasons Wednesday night, and showrunner Erica Messer says she and her writers considered some "crazy" out-of-the-box ideas for the 10-episode final season. "Yeah, there was crazy stuff thrown out in the room, and we didn’t just shoot it down," Messer tells EW. "We would say, 'Okay, how could that happen?' The idea of a live episode or… what do you call it?… a documentary film crew following the crew around. We ended up exploring some of those, but ultimately we weren’t able to find a way to keep it true to the series. A musical would just take you so far out, that we just didn’t know if that would be the right way to go or not." Asked about the potential musical episode, Messer adds: "I mean, somebody brought it up for our final 10. 'Do we do a musical?' We were like, how in the world would we do it? And I think the idea was gone by the time we ordered lunch but we did think about it. It’s a classic! You have to think about it for a second, right? But we didn’t want to go too far off the beaten path in the show’s final run. There were a couple of episodes that we thought, 'oh, let’s just make this 100 percent from the unsub’s point of view.' But then you’re never really seeing the team. I mean, we loved the idea. We all sort of rallied around it but then said, 'Wait, this is the final 10 hours of this show. If you have one of those hours where you’re not seeing all of our favorite people on the screen, fans are going to feel like they’re getting cheated out of an hour of our team.' And so while I think that would have been a great idea to do some other season, it didn’t feel like the right time to do it in our finale season. So we took a kernel of that idea and made an episode around that."
ALSO:
Showrunner Erica Messer on filming the final scene (https://www.etonline.com/criminal-minds-boss-on-saying-goodbye-after-15-seasons-with-a-bittersweet-ending-exclusive-141788): "That was a sad night but sadder when watching it than while shooting it, but super sad when they all got in the elevator and the doors closed on them"
Messer says "we had to get down to the nitty-gritty" in deciding which villains to bring back (https://www.tvinsider.com/914902/criminal-minds-series-finale-garcia-note-reid-maeve-rossi-chameleon/)
Messer says it was "really hard" deciding which flashbacks to use in the series finale (https://www.tvguide.com/news/criminal-minds-boss-breaks-down-the-biggest-moments-from-an-explosive-series-finale/)
See the Criminal Minds cast then and now (https://people.com/tv/criminal-minds-cast-then-now/)