Two TV series I pretty much binge watched recently are both, in a way, origin myths. And nicely redolent of the feel and atmosphere of the rather recent past.
Sadly yet fascinatingly, serial killers are of rather high interest in the current zeitgeist. Witness the long-term success of the series Criminal Minds.
The birth of the FBI’s serial crime unit and the practices of criminal profiling and psychology are the focus of the Netflix show Mindhunter. It’s set in 1977 and I can attest from living (quite fully) in that era that the show looks and feels like the real life of those times. And that is merely a potent yet still minor charm of this quite engaging and at times provocative series.
Executive produced by director David Fincher and actress Charlize Theron, the series is a class act all the way. And both somewhat chilling and disturbing, yet also quite curiously humane at the same time.
Its main characters are two very different, yet both dedicated FBI agents who undertake interviewing serial killers to gain knowledge that might help them solve such cases in the future, maybe even gain some predictive insight. As the first season unfolds, they are joined by a woman psychologist in what becomes an powerful dramatic triad.
Even more weighted with human and dramatic profundity are their interviews with killers. The cold and numbed affect of Richard Speck evokes, appropriately, chills. His 1966 murder of eight student nurses in Chicago was at the time a horrific benchmark in the emergence of serial killings into the public consciousness. Actor Cameron Britton’s takes as the beastly, yet cunning Edmund Kemper, are stunningly disturbing.
The show has been renewed for a second season. The old saw of baited breath expresses my state as I await more of this masterful show.
Halt and Catch Fire arrived recently on Netflix after a four-season run on AMC from 2014 to late last year. It takes place within the pioneering personal computer business of the 1980s into the rise of the Internet in the ‘90s. Two of the seasons take place in the Dallas, Texas, area (the “Silicon Prairie”); the last two are set in Silicon Valley in California.
The show’s pivot is computer salesman and entrepreneur Joe MacMillan. My only issue with the show is how actor Lee Pace’s take on him sometimes feels a bit too similar to the Mad Men lead character Don Draper. That quibble is more than made up for by the splendid portrayal of a female punk-rock code monkey by Mackenzie Davis, an odd woman out yet at the lead in the geek guy world of early computing.
It’s a fictional tale, yet it feels very real. It offers a fine vehicle for experiencing recent history as mythology and insight into development of the world-changing digital environment in which we all now live.
TV Documentary Series: Active Shooter: America Under Fire – A very moving and emotionally provocative current booked to one aspect of what the budding profilers in Mindhunter. This Showtime series offers a “you are there” looks at such mass murders as, first, the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater spree. Subsequent episodes look at such other incidents as the Columbine school murders, the Charleston, S.C., church shootings and the Orlando gay nightclub massacre. Best watched in small doses.
Web Publication: Narratively – This site’s tagline is “Human Stories, Boldly Told.” And it lives up to the claim with excellent journalism and storytelling that, as they say in their “About” copy, provides “some of the most engaging content on the Internet.”
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2018
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