The final season of the delightful sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine was being created in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. While the show had dealt with race and policing throughout its run, often being more serious and nuanced than you would expect from a wacky workplace comedy, there was practically no choice but to truly grapple with the ongoing legacy of harm done by law enforcement against people of color in this country. Though they had delved into topics like bigotry well-embedded in the police force, incompetence, and corruption in previous seasons, the cultural moment felt like it called for something more than that. What followed was the shows final season with many of the characters grappling with what it means to be a police officer and the ways they might be perpetuating harm. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a genre of sitcom I call “feel-good comedy.” Think The Good Place, Schitt’s Creek, and Parks and Recreation. It’s not that these shows don’t have bad or stupid people doing bad or stupid things. And it’s not that they’re without any bite to their bark. Fundamentally, though, they share a certain optimism on humanity and what’s possible for the characters and, ultimately, for us, the human race. You see a lot of critiques of Parks and Rec specifically for being some sort of neo-liberal mess of vapidness painting over the flaws of our democracy and I find that critique misguided and incapable of engaging with a text. It’s a “I find it cringe because of the optimism when I’m ultimately a pessimist or nihilist, or I don’t vibe with the comedy, and I must moralize my tastes.” But who knows, I’m not a revolutionary and I don’t support accelerationist doomerism. At my core, I am an optimist. Self-taught. And I mean that in an Everything Everywhere All at Once way, where it’s a mindset I embedded in myself to better survive this world.
In a similar vein of critique, the sort that people throw out there and assume a simple label functions as solid criticism that proves a piece of arts moral worth, the people who hate Parks and Rec also tend to hate Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And the critique they give it to prove its moral faults, the one the show felt obligated to maneuver through in its final season, is that it’s “copaganda.”
Copaganda is, as you’ve probably guessed, a combination of cop and propaganda. The idea is that art of this form functions primarily as public relations for policing. Through consuming them, the public gains sympathy for cops, accept more egregious actions, view any in the force as heroes, et cetera, et cetera. An example that pops into my mind is NCIS. There are several episodes in the series where one of the main federal agents abuses their power in some way, threatening, harming, killing people in their custody for various reasons. Because of the heightened emotions, most of the time the show seems to want you on their side in these moments. Gibbs physically threatens someone in the interrogation room and he’s got a point because they need that information. Similarly, think of the thriller drama 24. Jack Bauer often tortures information out of people on that show. The implicit throughline of those moments of violence is that torture works. It doesn’t. It often leads to unreliable information, flatout lies, and false confessions meant to make the various pains stop.
A couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend about “copaganda” as a label broadly applied to any media that deals with police or federal agents of any sort without painting them as incompetent monsters. While I’m quite partial to critiques of police and the criminal justice system in the United States at large, I find that instinct… odd. Especially when combined with an often times implicit but sometimes flatout spoken desire to censor and rid us of all so-called “copaganda.” The show we were talking about, specifically, was Criminal Minds.
At the time, I was in the middle of a rewatch of the show. It was a couple of months into the pandemic. I had graduated college and was already missing it, though who knows how much of that was some general nostalgia and wanting a way back from the fears of COVID. I had this desire to start writing essays again. Not necessarily academic papers since I don’t care for the general style restrictions. I prefer personal essays that disregard the idea of objectivity and opt instead to intersect the author’s personal life and experience with whatever subject they’re writing about. Nonfiction writing is creative writing. Academic writing? Not so much. So I wanted to talk about Criminal Minds and the ways it explores the lives of people so embedded in darkness.
I left that concept to the side for a couple of years. A couple of months ago, I started another rewatch. It’s the first time I’ve gotten through the entirety of the show from start to finish. The last time I watched it, I hadn’t made it to Hotch leaving the team. Spoiler alert, but you chose to click on a video essay about a specific piece of media, so really, if you get spoiled here AND get upset about it, that’s on you.
First, I’m going to admit that this has less research than my videos normally do. It’s mostly my personal analysis, and I’m not doing a mega-detailed deep-dive review recap into a 15-season tv show. This is not Quinton Reviews.
What’s really interesting about Criminal Minds comes from its very premise. This is a show that aims to explore the minds of some of the worst criminals. It’s Mindhunt but less prestige and far less Jonathan Groff which is always a sin, but they make up for it with excellent performances from the women on the cast. Kirsten Vangness does consistently amazing work. The guys don’t do bad at all, but still. Maybe it’s the gay instinct in me to stan women. So for 15 seasons we follow the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit as they assist on homicide cases, abductions, hostage situations, cults, and more. Pretty much every episode someone says, “It’s time to deliver the profile,” and then they give parameters that they suspect the unsub - unknown subject, which is what they call suspects - to fit within. They’re probably a white male in their mid-20s to early 30s. Is that because of a casting issue in the entertainment issue? Possibly. Behavioral profiling is based on compiled data and inferences based on trends in criminology and psychology. “These behaviors tend to correlate with these conditions or histories.” Like many social sciences, it isn’t as exact as people want. Personal biases also play a role. This pops up in the show every now and then, especially when a female unsub shows up when they were profiling a man on assumption. They even point out how a relative lack of data and sexist presumptions can lead to such mistakes.
To correctly profile a criminal, as far as such a thing is possible, you have to delve into their mind. You have to go the Dark Places and give Gillian Flynn a good review on Goodreads because her books are dope. You have to study the data and psychology. You have to imagine your way through scenarios. Importantly, you have to empathize with both victim and unsub.
Their required empathy directly affects the show's commentary on criminals, outcasts, mental illness, the criminal justice system, and the FBI specifically. This is not a show about how cool and good at their jobs cops and feds are. This is a show about sympathy for sinners.
First Kill - Criminals
When people talk about some of the most disturbing episodes of the entire series, there’s a chance they’ll bring up the “human doll” episode. If you’ve seen the show, are you thinking about the human marionettes or the human porcelain dolls?
A woman who was abused by her father collects young women, drugs them, and treats them as her personal doll collection. When they go in to arrest her and rescue her victims, Agent Reid brings in some of the dolls her father had taken away when she was a child. He tells her she can have them and no one will steal them ever again. This gets her to surrender. She cries and holds the dolls. They’re taken with her. Despite the disturbing nature of her crimes, the show treats her with a certain delicacy. A tragedy. This woman isn’t a horrifying monster.
Neither is the man who dislocates people’s joints to turn them into human marionettes for theatre performances. That episode is one that sticks with you. It’s delightful in its horror. When you take a step back, it’s almost an homage to Rocky Horror. The hallucination of people clapping in the audience as everything ends, the nonconsensual use of victims as theatre performers. The man seems to be manipulated by a partner in crime. Except he isn’t. His partner is a puppet. His psychotic delusion has fed him a false belief and a false master. The end here, too, with him walking out through his imagined audience, paints him with a tragic sympathy. You feel for his victims, but you feel for him too. This is not a monster.
Even with its Big Bads, these criminal masterminds that are maybe supposed to be closer to movie slasher villains than actual people, the show still impresses the importance of empathy. Take Cat Adams. She’s a ruthless hit woman who ruins Reid’s life and fixates on him. On a meta level, her casting forces us to empathize with her to some degree. Aubrey Plaza holds an insane level of charisma. When she has her emotional moments, you walk them with her. You see the girl that wants her father. And it’s through that empathy that she’s caught and defeated each time. Reid’s ability to understand her is what allows him to win over her. Playing into her desire for love and romance. The dreamscape dance between the two of them when he questions her at prison is beautiful. You love to hate her. She’s a bit of a tragic figure.
I think there’s potentially no more tragic figure than an early episode focus: a woman on death row. The team slowly discovers that she was not responsible for any of the murders her husband committed, and she never harmed her son. She gave him away. But despite this, and despite finding the boy and having the ability to exonerate her, to save her from death, she still chooses to die. For her to live, her son would have to know who she is. He would suddenly inherit a tremendous amount of trauma. As a mother, she doesn’t want to do that. So she goes to die. She’s almost saintly. You break watching the episode. And through this episode, we’re forced to ask a simple question: how many criminals are innocent, accepting punishment for whatever reason? It breeds a “what if” inside of us. And that “what if” has a child. If at the last second, the episode pulled the rug out from you and said, actually, she was a horrible person who did horrible things and caused horrible pain, would that destroy the empathy it built for her? How much of that tragedy exists even in the truly criminal?
Criminal Minds is an important show, especially as far as cop shows go, in that it goes out of its way often to argue that there aren’t really monsters. There are just people. Even if those people do monstrous things. Of course, the investigators don’t always believe that. J.J. I think has a conversation on the plane after an episode where she talks about how she’s scared that empathizing with these monsters they track is going to kill her humanity. Through the struggles of the BAU members, you see a different form of sympathy come through: an appreciation of hatred. In the early seasons, Gideon is sort of a paragon of anger. It makes him reckless, almost. But he’s not as angry as Agent Greenaway who eventually tracks down and shoots an unsub in cold blood. We spend the episode building to this, living in her fears and angers. We know *why* she did this. But the show says “no. This was not a good thing.” When Agent Hotchner beats the man who killed his wife to death in a later episode, he has to be pulled off the corpse. Though this instance was mostly in self-defense, it’s portrayed as tragic. His anger is empathized with. Between the two, the show does something odd. It does critique police violence. Greenaway primes us to critique Hotch, at least in the back of our minds. The episode is framed as an investigation into his actions. At the same time, Hotch makes us retroactively empathize with Greenaway. I don’t think it’s meant to be in a “yeah! Police violence! Woo!” way. But I think it’s the show suggesting that we can hold empathy for anger and revenge, too. That’s a bit challenging for me, personally. I used to be an insanely angry person. In dealing with that, I overcorrected, as my mother likes to suggest. To a degree, I don’t really understand certain levels of anger. The want for revenge doesn’t make any sense to me. Morally, I don’t think there’s any defense for it. It’s wholly unacceptable, and this has brought me flack from people who get annoyed when I critique the desire for violence. I’ve been told I haven’t been “thoughtful” about it and I should think more about how good it is to hurt certain people. No. I’m not going to do that. I have thought about it a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that harming people is bad. The desire for revenge is bad. But, as Criminal Minds is there to remind us, something being “bad” does not mean you can’t try to empathize with the people committing such actions.
But what about the victims of violent fantasy and action?
Second Kill - Outcasts
One of the most consistent throughlines of Criminal Minds from start to end is how certain groups are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes. Sex workers, drug users, and the homeless aren’t only frequently targeted, but they’re also the most likely to be ignored. The criminalization of various behaviors makes these groups less likely to report to the authorities in the first place, and less likely to be believed when they do report. When there are fewer of them, politicians and civilians alike celebrate and think the locales are improving.
Episode after episode, the team joins in on a case where a serial killer has an absurdly high kill count. Typically, they get to that point by targeting the members of society you might consider outcasts. The less likely you are to be missed by non-outcasts, the easier it is to get away with doing harm to you.
There’s a duo of episodes that might be most widely remembered for the “corpses were eaten by pigs on a farm” aspect of it, which, to be fair, is a delightfully disturbing concept. But two other things stuck with me. The first is one of the two unsubs is presented as having some sort of developmental disorder. He’s a large, somewhat uncontrollable brute who’s quick to anger. He’s manipulated by his paralyzed brother who tries to get the cops to shoot him. The episodes spend some time with this brother, and we find him childlike. He wants friends and family and love. But he’s been pointed in violent directions that have led him to do reprehensible things. As we spent more and more time with him, I couldn’t help but feel for the poor man. When, at the end, frightened, he charges the cops and gets shot down, the show portrays it as a tragic moment. And it is. I think there’s a line to be walked here. He is portrayed as scary at first. I can understand how someone might come to a negative critique as scaremongering over developmental differences. You know, Hereditary makes me a bit uncomfortable with how it treats the little girl for similar reasons. But here I think the horror is meant to force you to question your assumptions and the cops’ actions at the end. They shoot him because they’re scared, just like you were at first. They see him as a monster just as you did at first. But by that point, you don’t see him as a monster. The assumptions were wrong, and they get people who can be saved killed. If we were to apply that sort of empathy and reflection, when else do we contribute to harm by giving in to instinctual fears of the “different?”
The other thing about that episode is that there are an uncountable number of victims. They find their shoes near the pigpin. All of them went missing in a similar area. How could so many people go missing and no one care, you ask? Because the victims were quote-unquote “undesirables.” The homeless. The poor. The addicted. The sex worker. Tortured and murdered and left to the wolves because no one cared to make sure they were alive. Except for one man. And without him, someone no one believed at first, it’s an open question how many more lives would have been stolen.
In an earlier season, the team is approached by a detective who, similarly, insists that such outcasts are going missing in his city and he needs their help. His superior denies the FBI’s help until they forcibly take the case from him when it’s revealed they technically have jurisdiction. Hotch says to the police captain, “What if they were cheerleaders? Or teachers or mothers? How did you put it? Can bums even be missing? Well sir they can. They can be hurt, they can be scared and they can be killed.” The judgment and lack of empathy expressed towards these individuals directly led to more and more of them being harmed. To drive this point home, we spend the episode with one of the victims, Maggie, assumedly a sex worker of some sort. She wakes up in a Saw-esque maze. We watch her asking for help and trying to be kind to the man who obviously drugged her and is harming her. We stay with her as she crawls across broken glass and watch her use her jacket to wipe a path through the shards. We see her smarts and bravery, her resilience. We root for her. This is another episode structured in such a way as to force us to question how we judge so-called outcasts. This woman is human. She deserves to be saved. And if we can recognize that, doesn’t that mean we can recognize it with people in real life too?
In the season we get introduced to the wonderful Agent Emily Prentiss, someone is going around killing sex workers in DC. A politician doesn’t want much focus on it because she’s about to announce the success of her crime bill in reducing DC’s crime rate. When the team has deduced that the unsub likely worked on that bill or lobbied for it, they bring her in to talk with some of the women who’ve had dealings with him. She insults the women and the team. But they know the exact information to give. They make it clear that a lot of politicians in DC visit them. By presenting them as smart and capable, again the show invites the audience to not only empathize with them as victims but as people in general. When one of the women is shown continuing being a sex worker after this, it’s also saying, “Some people choose this work. They are still human.” Which of course they all. But in a world of prudish cruelty thrown at the “other,” having a wildly popular crime drama make a point of pointing that out is important. The episode also has one of the victims be underage. She’s still a sex worker. People talk a lot about the exploitation of the sex industry, but then go around and still continue to judge and belittle the workers in it. “Those poor creatures, despicable, disgusting sinners they are. We want to save them! But they get what they deserve.” Here the show is saying, “When you dismiss these groups, when you dehumanize, when you deny them empathy, you’re denying it to the very people you’re supposedly concerned about.”
Speaking of discarding concern when it becomes inconvenient…
Third Kill - Mental Illness
There was a really annoying set of discourses going on when I was graduating high school about seven centuries ago. It went along the lines of “people are romanticizing mental illness.” The “lol I’m so quirky cause I have depression” thing. But it also very much means that people will claim to support the mentally ill but immediately drop that when mental illness actually leads to people acting in potentially asocial ways. A common example is self-care. Some people with severe depression have trouble maintaining hygiene. If you don’t want to live, convincing yourself to brush your teeth can be insanely difficult.
Think about people with substance abuse problems. There’s a lot of talk about addiction being a disease and so people struggling with it need empathy. But when that disease rears its ugly head… Well. Look how this country treats addicts. There are some online who paint themselves as virtuous but will quickly use someone’s struggle with addiction as a gotcha in an argument.
Criminal Minds is a show concerned, obviously, with the criminal mind. It’s a show whose entire purpose is the exploration of empathy with asocial action. So there was no way for the show to last as long as it has without exploring mental illnesses dozens upon dozens of times.
When I was younger, pretty much all of my teens, crime dramas clicked in a weird way in my brain that made it seem like a lot of various mental illnesses are a death sentence. Not for you but for those around you. Schizophrenics are always being told to kill people by evil voices in their heads. That’s not true, but it’s an easy trope to pull out for shows and films.
Criminal Minds rejects that framework.
The most demonized of mental illnesses is psychopathy. “That psychopath!” people shout when someone tries to rob a little old lady and her tiny frazzled kitten. If you remember that episode focusing on DC sex workers, the other focus of the episode is a young man played by the late, great Aton Yelchin. He has violent fantasies and desires. He wants to stab someone. He goes to Dr. Reid concerned about his potential for violence. The team strongly suspects he’s responsible for the murders, though he turns out not to be. How much of that insistence was born of a bias against psychopaths? He’s psychologically evaluated by Agent Gideon who suggests he be hospitalized. The young man takes this as confirmation that he’s a monster. That destroys him. At the end of the episode, we’re led to believe he kills one of the sex workers who talked with the politician, only for it to be revealed that when his violent urges grew, he instead tried to kill himself. He thought that was the only way to save the lives he felt he was destined to take. Between the writing and Yelchin’s performance, your heart breaks for him. The show wonders if he will go on to do violence, and determines that if he does, they’ll catch him. Until then, saving his life was the right thing to do. I’d posit that the show is suggesting pop cultural narratives around certain mental illnesses can create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that in turn damns certain people. This young man was oriented to the good. He wanted to control himself. He didn’t want to harm anyone. The idea that he might stresses him out tremendously. That stress almost turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even psychopaths, the show says, are not mindless, purely asocial, unemotional killing machines. They too are people.
We meet Reid’s mother pretty early on in the show’s run. Jane Lynch brings such a wonderful, strong fragility to the character. Reid’s mother is schizophrenic. Her illness evolved to the point where Reid felt the need to hospitalize her. We get a flashback for that moment, and Dianna Reid pleads. She doesn’t want to go away. She wants to be in her home. She wants to be with her son. That scene never fails to get me quite emotional. Lynch really sells the performance. Throughout the series, we get to spend time with Reid’s mom. Her illness really does do bad by her. Hospitalization was the right choice, but you still empathize with her pain. Her love. When Reid starts getting cluster headaches, he slowly hints that he, too, is likely schizophrenic. And we see that this terrifies him. He’s seen how the illness affected his mother and the people around her. He spends his time buried in the minds of the most dangerous criminals. Many of the examples he’s going to have besides his mother are violent. That adds to his terror. It doesn’t matter that analytically he knows most people with schizophrenia aren’t violent by any means. Through Reid and Dianna, we’re invited to empathize with schizophrenic people. We’re not just asked to tear down the violent assumptions we’ve been primed to have. The show asks us to empathize even when the illness is awful. When it’s tragic. When it showcases why it’s an illness.
Reid’s mom eventually gets diagnosed with dementia. Here too, the show asks for empathy. Dianna gets more paranoid as the disease develops alongside her schizophrenia. She gets a bit violent. Not to the degree where she’s a true danger, but she’s often scared and trying to protect herself and her son. We’re asked to sympathize with Reid, too, as he obsesses over finding a cure. He’s been told over and over that his incredible brain can fix things. But he can’t fix this. He can’t save his mom, and Reid can’t handle that. Think of anyone who has a loved one that has dementia. Criminal Minds wants you to hold space and love and gentleness for them even as they’re irrational. There are a million little tragedies in this world going on at all times.
JJ is at one point tortured by a traitor to the US. In the episodes following, she has trouble dealing with her rage. She doesn’t want to call it PTSD, but it is. And while the show asks you to be critical of that, especially in how she longs to act on it and how it might cause some recklessness, it doesn’t paint her a monster. Trauma can cause horrible wounds that don’t display in pro-social ways. One episode that might stick with you involves a veteran going through a severe instance of PTSD. A series of loud noises disorients him. He doesn’t go home to his wife. He sleeps in random enclaves. He has a delusion caused by his illness that he’s back in the warzone. When he kills, he thinks he’s killing enemy combatants. He thinks he’s saving children. Despite being a killer, when he’s shot by a sniper at the end of the episode, the show paints it as a tragedy. War did this. This was a good man taken by a horrible illness inflicted by war.
In two memorable episodes, the show tackles the violent tragedy of people suffering from multiple personalities or DID. There’s a lot of debate around how… real that is for lack of a better word. I’m not a psychiatrist so that’s not something I can really comment on, though it’s pretty easy to say some of the people claiming to have “systems” online are probably young people playing some weird roleplay game. But! Some people experience intense disassociation that they might conceptualize, consciously or not, as multiple personalities. Probably the most prominent examples in pop culture would be from horror films. You’ve got Split and Psycho for example. Like with schizophrenia and psychopathy, a good amount of the presented ideas are violent and cruel. They contribute to a certain stigmatization. In Criminal Minds, they’re exhibited by unsubs, so, there’s a criminality to the presentation. It does then play into those assumptions… to a degree. The show focuses on the dissociation of the disease and how it often seems to be born of abuse, often of a sexual nature, often done to a child.
In a set of episodes, Reid is kidnapped by a religious unsub who tortures him on a live stream. The unsub has a system composed of three individuals. The father, the son, and an angel, so one could say the holy ghost. The father is based on the unsub’s actual abusive father who is dead but continues to exert his control over the son through this violent, misogynistic alter. The angel, too, is violent. He kills. The son, the original personality, is almost at the mercy of the alters. He feels intense remorse and regret but his fear of his father prevents him from acting against the worst impulses. When he’s eventually shot and killed by Reid, it’s not a victorious moment, not in whole.
Nor is it when a different unsub is taken into captivity after killing and assaulting several men he killed when he was under the influence of a female alter. At the end of the episode, overwhelmed by it all, the unsub entirely dissociates into the female alter, seemingly trapping his original, true self deep within him. This is presented almost as a horror situation for the young man. Reid is determined to find a way to bring him back and defeat the alter. We never get an update on this. Assumedly, Reid never succeeds. Yes, this does carry some uncomfortable “evil trans possession” vibes a la Psycho.
Even when the series showcases the potential certain illnesses have for extreme violence, it never concludes, “This was inevitable.” Or “These people are monsters.” Or even “they are without tragedy.” And much of the tragedy in the show is directly caused or worsened by
Fourth Kill - The Criminal Justice System
Cast your mind back to the death row episode, where an innocent woman resigned herself to death to protect her son. The very premise of that episode is an admission that the American justice system sends innocent people to their deaths. Throughout the episode, as the team gains new evidence and tracks down new leads that point them towards her innocence, they try to delay her execution. The warden won’t hear it. The potential that she’s innocent doesn’t change a thing for him. He’s there when it’s made clear she is innocent, and he doesn’t fight his role at all. She still ends up in the executioner’s chamber. The episode says, “Even when realizing death has been handed to an innocent, the criminal justice system of America will still kill them unless they’re specifically ordered to stop.” The sympathy you feel in this episode is aimed against the death penalty itself. “This is unjust,” it says. “We are killing innocents,” it says. The show uses your feelings for the woman to get you to ask how many times we kill innocents and pretend that’s justice.
The second section touched on how the show handles “outcasts.” By its very nature, those episodes are a critique of law enforcement. They pick and choose what cases to take and which ones to take seriously. Whose life matters? Whose doesn’t? Those episodes get you to relate and root for these “others” while pointing to segments of law enforcement and saying, “They didn’t cross that low bar with you. They didn’t view these people as human. And that dehumanization led to their suffering.”
There are more direct ways the show uses sympathy for supposed sinners to critique law enforcement. There are two seasons where corrupt local cops end up killing their sheriffs. In one, a deputy targets the local Hispanic population because he’s a racist. When he’s close to being caught and isn’t being lauded as a hero, he kills the sheriff and goes to do a little massacre. In another, an entire collection of corrupt cops work for the head muddy piggy who runs some less than legal operations in the city. What’s really interesting to me here is that none of the corrupt cops in these two episodes are portrayed in any sort of positive or sympathetic light. If there are monsters in this show, they’re in episodes like these.
When Reid goes to prison at the machinations of Aubrey Plaza in her Emily the Criminal era, the warden and jail guards do practically nothing to protect Reid, a federal agent, from the criminals there who wish him harm once they discover that tidbit of information. They deny him protection. When he stabs himself to go to solitary, they keep him there for a singular day, as if it’s only a performance for the paperwork they’ll have to fill out once Reid is killed in Genpop. Obviously, Reid doesn’t die in these episodes. Here it seems to be suggesting that perhaps wardens and prison guards enjoy the potential specter of violence because it adds some spice to their lives. Or maybe they think it’s a form of justice. Think of how guards famously avert their eyes from how prisoners handle child molesters.
When one of those corrupt cops ends up on death row, lovable tech analyst Garcia ends up visiting him to assuage some of her guilt over her role in landing him there. Though the show clearly paints him as reprehensible, when he asks her to be there for his execution because no one else will be, there’s still a tragedy to it. To die with no one there is one of the core fears of humanity, I think. Death itself is scary, but to do it alone? To be lonely? It seems the show is saying, “Some people might be beyond redemption. That doesn’t mean they are beyond humanity.”
Unless, of course, they’re the –
Fifth Kill - The FBI
When I was talking with that friend about Criminal Minds and its supposed existence in the pantheon of copaganda, we discussed how the sympathy for sinners required of the profilers often harms their own lives and psyches. Once you learn how to spot thermals, you start seeing them everywhere. You have nightmares. You become used to the idea of dying and inflicting death. They actively have to fight their instincts in order to keep their humanity and their ability to see the humanity in the worst crimes one could commit. This, she said, was one of the tenets of copaganda. Is there any more pro-cop message than saying that the violence they do destroys them and therefore their profession is noble in a way? When you humanize the monsters, the cops, aren’t you running interference for them?
I understand that critique to a certain extent. I do think the “noble sacrifice” line is a solid line of critique that can be quite interesting, though I’m hard pressed to imagine a compelling narrative where the actions and events don’t have that sort effect at any point on the characters? I mean, you see it less in other procedurals. NCIS is funny but like, they rather happily embrace the awfulness of their job. Because there’s no struggle, the audience isn’t invited to struggle. You either embrace it as spectacle and enjoy it as action or you have to view the whole show with a sort of morbid, disgusted fascination. I think there are potentially really fun conversations to be had around that half of the suggestion. But on the note of being anti-humanization… There was a movie I watched in high school, I think, that followed a group of young men training and then heading off into a brutal war. You get to know them and enjoy them and then it turns out that they are deployed by Germany. They are of a collection that’s the shining example of “monster.” What does it mean to empathize with them? To humanize them? Is a piece of art that asks you to do that then running cover for those groups? No. You might not like the idea of considering people who do evil things as people, but they are. And that point is important. Maybe eventually I’ll remember the name of that film, watch it again, and talk about it here. Who knows. But because I’d seen that line of argumentation from people whose only way of engaging in art is to do moral CinemaSins, it annoyed me a bit when she brought it up.
But I do want to ask: what does the show say about the FBI?
In one of the later seasons, the BAU is partially dismantled at the behest of a power-hungry politico in the bureau who’s looking to become Director someday. Zach and Cody’s mom takes over and tells them she’ll approve every case. When approving, she aims the team at cases that will bring good media coverage to the BAU. She is big on playing for the camera. We’re meant to side with the BAU members. In doing so, we’re made to ask… are the rank and file at the DOJ at large restricted sometimes from pursuing justice for public relations reasons? That’s an accusation you might be familiar with through the DOJ’s handling of Donald Trump’s various crimes.
The bias of members can also get people killed. One episode is framed through JJ explaining the details of a case to her husband as they promised each other to never keep the haunts of a case bottled up. They sleep with each other, not ghosts. When JJ was rescuing a group of hostages from a burning building, one of them, screaming for help, dies in an explosion. It’s a wonderfully acted episode. JJ tells her husband that she saved the little boy first because he reminded her of her own son. And so his life meant more to her. Though he assures her that she did what was right in saving people, in being that boy’s hero, she still struggles with it. You aren’t asked to hate JJ here by any means, but you are asked to empathize with her self-hatred. How many times have they failed? How many times have they blamed themselves and how many times have their biases played into someone getting killed?
One of the more supposedly chilling episodes of the show involves a family of killers who go around kidnapping young girls, killing off anyone in their house, and then forcing that young girl to be the bride of son. It doesn’t ask what happens if they have a daughter instead. You can either assume they do the same to find her a husband or you can assume the worst, like I do, and assume they either abandon or murder any girl babies. At the end of the episode, the mom and son are in custody. The mother tells the boy to not tell the FBI about his brothers. The episode ends with another segment of the family out on the hunt. It’s the sort of cliffhanger ending that you might expect to come back at some point, but it never does. The BAU never completely closes that set of cases. The FBI fails to bring down a murder cult.
Every now and then, there’s an episode where they get the wrong person or the unsub slips beyond their reaches. The FBI is not infallible by any means. In fact, the BAU is often toyed around with by unsubs. Their decisions about what to reveal to the media have led to people getting killed, injured, and tortured. Speaking of, when the team is stressed, they often behave in violent ways. Greenaway shoots an unsub and stages a crime scene. Hotch beats a man to death. Reid poisons a bunch of inmates and strangles Aubrey Plaza. In one episode, the show tries to get you to believe that Prentiss killed a young boy and took photos of it. In order to do that, they had to build the idea that this was something she was capable of. She was former intelligence, and Criminal Minds lives in a world where intelligence agencies are brutal and efficient. You’re forced to ask, what if these characters we love are the monsters after all?
Despite the bleak subject matter, Criminal Minds is, at its core, a hopeful show. It believes criminals can be caught and that while law enforcement is often flawed and criminal itself, it can also be good. The members of the BAU may struggle with morality at times, with their own darkness, with the darkness they have to bathe themselves in for their jobs, but most often they choose good. Because good is a choice. The members of the BAU all have done harm to other people. They are sinners, too. And they still hold our sympathies.
While Criminal Minds is a crime procedural, I don’t really think it’s about the FBI. It’s not really about horror or mystery. The episodes often aren’t presented in a way conducive to the whole “solve the mystery alongside characters” thing. I don’t even think it’s about profiling. While the show sometimes goes into what profiles are, how they’re made, and how useful they might actually be… We rarely get into what really drives them. This isn’t Mindhunter. We’re not interviewing or exploring the literature. We aren’t pulling through the statistics so much as we are vaguely referencing them. Criminal profiling is more of an interesting lens to present the core concept of the show: what does it mean to have sympathy for sinners? If there was more of it, would it be easier to contain the criminal? Would we make a society that is more just and fair? Or might that sympathy destroy you? If you choose to sacrifice yourself in pursuit of such sympathy, is that a good thing? Is it not? Those are the questions, I feel, are at the center of Criminal Minds. It’s how it leverages its strongest critiques and how it argues for a better world. It doesn’t make a case for better or stricter policing. It doesn’t argue about evidence. Most episodes aren’t really concerned with evidence finding. It isn’t arguing, even, that profiles are great at putting away criminals. We rarely see how their findings are used in court.
Rather, Criminal Minds suggests the world is filled with what we consider “sinners.” And much like in the world of harsh, evangelical Christianity, that label of “sinner” leads to great harm and destruction and misunderstanding. It is through sympathy for sinners that “justice” can even begin to approach being “just.” WIthout that, in its current state, criminals are made through a harsh world and are killed through a harsher one. Outcasts find themselves victims unable to gain justice. The mentally ill are stigmatized, driven to violence, and abandoned. The criminal justice system breeds bad actors, apathetic cops, and cold, cruel “justice.” The FBI operates as a public relations farm operated by robotic monsters. And society becomes worse.
Is it copaganda? I don’t give a solitary shit. Sure. But that label is probably the least interesting point of conversation for the show, and I wish we could stop drive-by criticism that refuses to actually engage with the substance of art. People like mysteries and crime dramas. If they’re going to fill our screens, better they be Criminal Minds and argue for sympathy than be a show that paints police brutality as based and valid.
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