Although many psychological thriller shows borrow from the same playbook as CBS’s three-season classic Hannibal, only one Netflix series managed to make the show seem tame in comparison. HBO’s True Detective season 1 is often credited with single-handedly setting the template for the next decade of psychological thrillers, and there’s some validity to this claim. The show’s blend of dark, gothic atmosphere, a troubled, conflicted detective antihero, and an A-list cast was borrowed by everything from Sharp Objects to Netflix’s His & Hers.
That said, there is another, earlier police procedural show from the 2010s that rarely gets its due when it comes to its influence on later detective dramas. Running for three seasons on NBC, Hannibal debuted in 2013 and aired its series finale in 2015. Although author Thomas Harris’s iconic title character had already been seen on screen in the movies Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Hannibal Rising, Hannibal did an astounding job of reinventing the already acclaimed franchise.
The show’s twisty cat and mouse game between Hugh Dancy’s obsessed criminal profiler Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen’s surprisingly sympathetic serial killer Hannibal Lecter was as mesmerizing as it was grotesque, as Hannibal pushed the boundaries of what network TV could portray well past what CSI and its imitators attempted. However, although Hannibal was truly creepy, Netflix’s Mindhunter was a rare psychological thriller that made the show look tame.
Mindhunter’s Real-Life Serial Killer Interviews Make The Netflix Thriller Terrifying
Loosely adapted from the non-fiction book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, Mindhunter was set in the late 1970s. The show followed Jonathan Groff’s rookie FBI agent Holden Ford and his unlikely partner, Holt McCallany’s cynical Bill Tench, as the pair tried to establish the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit with the help of Anna Torv’s psychologist, Wendy Carr.
While all of these characters are based on an amalgamation of real people, Mindhunter’s protagonists were fictional. However, the serial killers who Tench and Ford interview as part of Mindhunter’s story are very much real, and the show relied on meticulous recreations of the pair’s real-life interviews to provide some of its most profoundly unsettling moments. Where Hannibal used spectacular violence inspired by Se7en to scare viewers, Mindhunter used quiet, intimate conversations with real murderers.
Season 1 featured lengthy talks with murderers like Edmund Kemper, Dennis Reader, and Montie Russell and since, unlike Hannibal Lecter, these are real killers. Viewers could even look up some of the real interviews after watching. As if this weren’t chilling enough, season 2 moved on to more famous murderers like Charles Manson and the Son of Sam, still maintaining the same stripped-back, simple approach to the interview sequences.
Mindhunter’s Blend of Fact and Fiction Has Never Been Outdone
Mindhunter executive producer David Fincher’s work on 2007’s underrated Zodiac proved that sometimes, when it comes to real-life crimes, less is more. Thus, the Netflix show left almost all of its violence offscreen, relying on these bravura interview sequences to carry the audience’s interest through morbid conversation alone. The result was a success, but one that hasn’t successfully been replicated since.
Even though Ryan Murphy’s Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Shards is a stellar serial killer thriller that marries the producer’s maximalist aesthetic to fitting source material, his Netflix true crime anthology series Monster was a disastrous attempt to replicate Mindhunter’s appeal. The show’s gory action tries hard to outdo the earlier hit, but falls way short.
To be fair to Murphy, most true-crime dramatizations and police procedurals released since Mindhunter’s cancellation have failed to recapture the show’s quiet, brooding intensity. With almost none of Hannibal‘s gore, Mindhunter somehow managed to make an even more unsettling show out of nothing more than transcripts of real-life serial killer interviews.
- Release Date
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2017 – 2019
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Joe Penhall
- Directors
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David Fincher, Carl Franklin, Andrew Dominik, Andrew Douglas, Asif Kapadia, Tobias Lindholm
- Writers
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Joe Penhall, Jennifer Haley, Joshua Donen, Courtenay Miles, Carly Wray, Pamela Cederquist
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