Mindhunter Season 1 Netflix Series Review

Mindhunter (2017-)
Season 1 - 10 episodes (2017)

Watch Mindhunter Season 1 on Netflix // Buy the novel Mind Hunter: Inside FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
Created by: Joe Penhall
Starring: Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallanay, Anna Torv, Hannah Gross.
Rated: TV-MA

Plot
Two FBI agents interview imprisoned serial killers to help develop a psychological profile and solve ongoing cases in 1979.

Verdict
Mindhunter is engrossing. It isn't about the crime, in that we don't see sensational scenes of death. We delve into the psychology and interviews with the agents. It's fascinating and unsettling to hear Ed Kemper talk about his occupation as a killer as if it were common.
As the plot progresses, so do the characters. Holden starts out as an agent that wants to do good. He's earnest and naive, by the end his success has begin to make him arrogant.Tench seems too cautious, but his thoughts are reinforced as the series progresses. This is a great series that builds the characters throughout the run and makes you truly look at what makes a psychopath tick.
Watch it.

Review
This series is based on the 1995 book by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, where Douglas chronicled his time at the FBI profiling and tracking serial killers.
Produced by David Fincher & Charlize Theron, Fincher also helped launch Netflix's House of Cards.

There were a few loose threads this season, and if you're wondering if you'll get answers, a second season has already been confirmed.

I love period pieces and this strives for authenticity. The first episode starts with FBI agent Holden Ford acting as hostage negotiator. While no civilians or law enforcement are harmed, Holden wants to know why someone with no prior history would do this. This scene doesn't really reflect the show. The suicide is graphic, but the rest of the series is more introspective. This doesn't rely on the action of solving crimes. The characters want to prevent crimes and endeavor to understand. This sets up scenes with Holden interviewing serial killers. It's intense because you don't know what might happen. It's fascinating and horrifying because these killers are based on real people and we see how they think.

Holden Ford is fighting an uphill battle in the '70s. Psychological profiles don't exist. He sees their value, but law enforcement is content to state criminals are bad. Holden wants to identify criminal tendencies before the worst happens.
Holden tries to engender sympathy for the killers with law enforcement, but has little success. He doesn't believe psychopaths are always born bad. Sometimes the environment and stimuli can push them over an edge. He argues that it's not necessarily the feelings they have, but how they process them. Often that takes the form of acting out and killing.
Holden doesn't fit in mainly because he seeks understanding and not results. The FBI looks down on psychology and sees Holden's request to study killers as absurd. Some people are just born bad.
Holden catches the interest of Bill Tench who teaches local law enforcement better techniques. It's a bit of a student and teacher relationship. Holden is excited and ready to do good, annoyed at how uninterested Bill often is. It's an interesting dynamic where we initially side with Holden, but his success began to make him more arrogant. I began to realize how right Bill was when he cautioned Holden from the beginning to be careful and slow down.

Holden is becoming a renowned FBI agent that catches serial killers, writing the book on it, but he can't deduce his girlfriend. She frequently comments on it. By the time he puts the pieces together, it's too late.
Tench seems like an old tough guy, teaching law enforcement across the country, and they roll serial killer interviews into the travel. Their endeavor grows as they get psychologist Dr. Wendy Carr on board.
The psyche of the serial killers does consume you. Tench refutes Holden who says it doesn't, but everything Holden does with his girlfriend, even shopping for shoes takes on a new meaning because he's seeing it through the eyes of someone deranged. While he can process it, it still makes the world a scary place because it's changing him.

Holden and Tench start out in the dark, but begin to connect the dots from serial killer Ed Kemper to similarities in an ongoing case. Their intuition leads to success and a man is arrested. It's this success that begins to change Holden. He frequently argues it's his intuition to start the program that has led them to any success. He falls back on his intuition frequently. He encounters a school official that tickles children, despite parents and teachers asking him to stop. It's weird, but it isn't illegal. Holden wants to prevent the crime and you kind of think we haven't seen the last of the principal. You can argue Holden overstepped his bounds, and he did, but the school should have put a stop to it. He did the right thing when no one else would, even if he shouldn't have. That's a trait we've constantly seen in him, and it's one that is bound to get him in trouble at some point.

There's also a side story threaded through this season. We just see bits and pieces of a home security vendor, but that plot line is likely to take off at some point. You just know that guy will start killing.
Another side plot is Dr. Wendy Carr feeding a cat, or so we presume. She never sees it, but she hears it and the food is gone by morning. That is until one day it isn't. It's an apt metaphor. She and the FBI agents are feeding a beast they can't see. They're trying to make this serial killer interview scientific, but there are a lot of variables they just don't have.

The characters are strong. Holden and Tench have an up and down relationship, and the series builds the characters throughout the season. Tench is a bit rigid, but earnest agent Holden begins using his instincts as an excuse for lapses in judgement. His victories have made him arrogant.

The twist on this is that it isn't cops solving cases, the cases are often long gone. This delves into the mind of a killer. While the structure is completely different the psychology is similar to  The Fall in that you compare idiosyncrasies and outlooks of killers to how you see life. Holden is scaling the wall you've built between yourself and those crazy people. This isn't catch the bad guys, but explores what made them bad. As Holden realizes, you can't walk into that and come back unscathed.
It's chilling how nonchalantly Ed Kemper talk about his "occupation" and the "hunt." It's difficult to feel compassion for a killer, and when Holden almost gets there, something happens that reminds him these guys don't deserve it.

Holden pushes himself to the mental edge, trying to get in their heads. He manages to get a confession from a suspect in the last episode, but he almost stumbles into it. He's using a science he doesn't fully grasp and plenty of people are happy to tell him that, but it's exciting as we see him invent the field of mental profiling before our eyes. This was a show I couldn't put down and one I'll be counting the days until the next season.