this neglects to mention the real draw of criminal minds: the fact that every episode hinges on the question, “how do we make this even more unthinkably fucked-up?” on paper, criminal minds is the most disturbing thing this horror-fan has ever watched. https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/10/21215515/social-distancing-diaries-criminal-minds-cbs

the fucked-up-ness is merciless and escalating. it is not enough to find a woman dead and shoved into a box, her joints dislocated. no, the team discovers that the killer is dislocating all his victims’ joints with medieval torture equipment. and THEN

it turns out he’s DOING IT to transform his victims into marionettes that he hooks up to some agonizing rigging so that he can stage the death of his parents. also this whole time he’s been talking to an accomplice that, it’s revealed at the end, has been a puppet all along.

this is standard fare for criminal minds. they pack a full-fledged entry in the “saw” franchise into a tight 30 minutes, always reserving five of those minutes for the team to really cut loose at a house party by the very end.

the sheer inventiveness required to keep pumping out serial killers with increasingly batshit motivations for their rube-goldbergian murders is astounding. ALL creative energy goes into this aspect while the characters coast on personalities as thick as a single matzah sheet.

this dynamic — murderers with laughably labyrinthine, brutally horrific schemes vs. cut-out cops that could be computer programs—produces the most addictive cognitive dissonance i have ever experienced in watching a television show.

it’s like pitting infinite versions of hannibal lecter against five or so steves from blue’s clues. but the steves have to win, and also any version of PTSD the steves experience is sanitized into some slightly stressful flashbacks so they can work relatively uninterrupted.

at least two agents have been actually tortured on the show. everyone gets shot at least once. none of this is real — only the murders are real, HYPER-REAL, vivid and painstakingly detailed. the rest is flimsy scaffolding and jokes about rossi being married a bunch.

it’s emotional whiplash. it’s a slap in the face followed by butterfly kisses. it’s walking through an art gallery that alternates “saturn devouring his son” with a family of lisa frank dolphins. it’s an impossible object, a penrose triangle, its tones entirely irreconcilable.

it’s shriekingly “problematic” and, in many ways, derivative. but its comfort comes from this yawning gulf between the agent-world and the murderer-world. they’ve perfected this formula that allows saccharine mannequins to defeat ludicrously specific evils.

if you stop to really think about criminal minds, you’ll be able to hold that impossible object in your head for just a moment, and you’ll briefly go insane, like a lovecraft character faced with an ancient god. also you will develop a crush on spencer reid.

you will idly wonder, doing the dishes, who the next exchangeable brunette to join the team will be. you will do this while simultaneously watching a man lobotomize his sister and implant a homemade camera into her eye, because his father didn't love them equally.

anyway, my therapist (WHO ALSO WATCHES IT) thinks that someone somewhere is probably writing their thesis on this show. i'm on season 13 and i think i'm about to start paying for episodes, because they're not available otherwise. stay healthy.