I Love Criminal Minds, But Mandy Patinkin Was Right When He Left

Actor Mandy Patinkin, who starred in Criminal Minds, left the set after the second season, unable to cope with the script demands of one of the most popular but controversial crime shows right now. He then said:

“I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year. It was very destructive to my soul and my personality. After that, I didn't think I would get to work in television again.”

Criminal Minds is, In Fact, Overly Brutal

Perhaps viewers who have been watching Criminal Minds since the first season are already used to it, but it is worth admitting that this project is a fair of cruelty and psychological trauma.

The crimes are incredibly horrible – over 15 seasons (and two more seasons of the spin-off called Evolution), the show has become a kind of catalog of what kind of hell one person is capable of creating for another.

And the BAU team that catches criminals, under the leadership of geniuses of criminal psychology, are not the healthiest people themselves. It is quite difficult to watch. And to rewatch, too.

Criminal Minds Protagonists are Just As Broken As the Villains

Modern crime dramas are mostly leisurely stories, the outcome of each episode is predictable, the last victim is saved at the last minute, if someone is wounded, it is not serious, and the good always prevails.

The pros and cons of crime shows for me is that the screenwriters have to develop the main characters – they constantly fall in love, then fall out of love, then get hurt. But in most crime shows, you can skip all that.

However, Criminal Minds is different: the profilers are the victims themselves – sometimes they are hurt by criminals, sometimes by circumstances. And you involuntarily get caught up in their suffering, no less than the suffering of the victim of another madman with a homemade device for removing eyeballs from living women.

In Criminal Minds, the structure is that sad and slightly broken people seek out and find sad and very broken people by understanding them completely. And from a very early point on, the viewer is no longer trying to guess who the criminal is, but is asking a very different question: what is inside these good people that they can understand another serial killer so perfectly?

Source: EW