Criminal Minds Unpopular Opinions

[Danielg342]

I believe the central problem with Criminal Minds is the issue that tends to plague just about every "situational drama" that's an ensemble- the fact that you eventually have too many characters who pretty much all do "the same thing".

Let's start with the obvious- when you have something like a cop show or a medical drama or a courtroom drama there's not a whole lot more to the story other than "there's a case and we need to solve it". It's a very narrow kind of story and it's not one that lends itself to many characters since the only thing that the characters need to do is collect the clues, piece them together and arrive at a conclusion.

A lot of shows like CM will get around this by assigning different characters different parts of the "clue collection" (e.g., one handles the forensics, one handles the tech stuff, one handles the medical exam, etc.), but there's two problems with that.

One, there's not much for these characters to do except provide their two or three minutes of screen time to reveal their clue. After that, they're not needed.

Two is a rhetorical question- do we really need more than one character to piece all the clues together and arrive at a conclusion? Maybe you could add a second character here, just so the crime solvers have someone to bounce ideas off of, but that's it.

It's a fine format when you simply have a show about a detective or a doctor or a judge or a lawyer because you can just leave the minor characters to their roles and focus the storytelling on where it really matters- how the character solves the situation in the first place. This way you don't need to worry about exploring more than one or two characters.

However, if you take that show and insist that everyone in it has an equal part (even when they can't), you're stuck with not just being required to explore all the characters, you're also required to find the time to explore these characters.

If you had an infinite amount of episodes, you could do that. If you didn't have only an hour run time to do it, then you could do it.

However, network TV is what it is and there's only so much you can do when you have a 42-minute episode and you only get six or 13 or 22 of those episodes to do and you never know until the last minute if the network wants more of them (and how many more of them).

Which means, intrinsically, an ensemble procedural on network TV won't be able to explore the characters as much as they should. Streaming services and cable networks can rectify this because they tend to order their episodes in bulk and don't have the same run time constraints the networks do, leaving more room for the writers to expand their stories and build more characters.

Still, there's only so much they can do because ultimately even then there's a limit to what the writers can accomplish and how much the audience will sit through. There's only so much time during the day, after all.

Ultimately, when an ensemble works, it's because of one of two reasons:

1. The characters have a shared experience and thus a shared narrative. There's a reason why a lot of comedic ensembles are conceived as families or a group of friends that are like a family, because those groups have a natural connection together. You don't see a group of characters that are simply a collection of individuals- they are a collective, period. Sure, they may each have their separate stories, but those stories tend to be interwoven within other stories in the collective. That, or other members of the group will get involved in the stories of others in their group, since the members of the group all naturally care about each other.
2. The format of the show allows for a wide narrative that allows expansive "sub-narratives" to occur. Shows like Game of Thrones and Gotham are not about simple situations but about the wider world and the struggles within that world. Those shows tend to be about nuances and deconstructions and about the conflicts between different kinds of classes of characters, These shows tend to be about a theme and will explore everything about that theme, with each character "picking a side" in that theme. These shows don't tend to have a singular narrative or one point of view- they have several and while they're expected to converge and conflict, they are largely separate to a degree.

So I feel that ultimately CM was going to fail, especially as the show wore on. The cast turnover wasn't going to help, because that affects chemistry and further "individualizes" the characters.

I also don't really think CM really ever grasped the "team" dynamic. Especially in the later years the agents all just seemed to be "there" and you had no idea why all those characters were needed.

More to the point, you wonder why CM was even conceived as an ensemble in the first place. Did the show need anyone more than just Gideon and maybe Hotch? How complicated is the procedure of criminal profiling in total? This wasn't CSI which CM was designed to emulate- creating a profile needs nothing more than just one person or two people gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion. Why do we need a team of eight as we got to the later seasons? Haven't the showrunners heard of "too many cooks spoil the broth"?

Yeah, a non-ensemble CM would mean a show that probably doesn't have Reid or Morgan or Emily or any of the other supporting characters we may have grown to love...but, think about it. If you took them out- or replaced any of them with Gideon or Hotch- would you really miss much? I don't think so.

[blackwidowxx]

3 hours ago, Danielg342 said:

I believe the central problem with Criminal Minds is the issue that tends to plague just about every "situational drama" that's an ensemble- the fact that you eventually have too many characters who pretty much all do "the same thing".

Let's start with the obvious- when you have something like a cop show or a medical drama or a courtroom drama there's not a whole lot more to the story other than "there's a case and we need to solve it". It's a very narrow kind of story and it's not one that lends itself to many characters since the only thing that the characters need to do is collect the clues, piece them together and arrive at a conclusion.

A lot of shows like CM will get around this by assigning different characters different parts of the "clue collection" (e.g., one handles the forensics, one handles the tech stuff, one handles the medical exam, etc.), but there's two problems with that.

One, there's not much for these characters to do except provide their two or three minutes of screen time to reveal their clue. After that, they're not needed.

Two is a rhetorical question- do we really need more than one character to piece all the clues together and arrive at a conclusion? Maybe you could add a second character here, just so the crime solvers have someone to bounce ideas off of, but that's it.

It's a fine format when you simply have a show about a detective or a doctor or a judge or a lawyer because you can just leave the minor characters to their roles and focus the storytelling on where it really matters- how the character solves the situation in the first place. This way you don't need to worry about exploring more than one or two characters.

However, if you take that show and insist that everyone in it has an equal part (even when they can't), you're stuck with not just being required to explore all the characters, you're also required to find the time to explore these characters.

If you had an infinite amount of episodes, you could do that. If you didn't have only an hour run time to do it, then you could do it.

However, network TV is what it is and there's only so much you can do when you have a 42-minute episode and you only get six or 13 or 22 of those episodes to do and you never know until the last minute if the network wants more of them (and how many more of them).

Which means, intrinsically, an ensemble procedural on network TV won't be able to explore the characters as much as they should. Streaming services and cable networks can rectify this because they tend to order their episodes in bulk and don't have the same run time constraints the networks do, leaving more room for the writers to expand their stories and build more characters.

Still, there's only so much they can do because ultimately even then there's a limit to what the writers can accomplish and how much the audience will sit through. There's only so much time during the day, after all.

Ultimately, when an ensemble works, it's because of one of two reasons:

1. The characters have a shared experience and thus a shared narrative. There's a reason why a lot of comedic ensembles are conceived as families or a group of friends that are like a family, because those groups have a natural connection together. You don't see a group of characters that are simply a collection of individuals- they are a collective, period. Sure, they may each have their separate stories, but those stories tend to be interwoven within other stories in the collective. That, or other members of the group will get involved in the stories of others in their group, since the members of the group all naturally care about each other.
2. The format of the show allows for a wide narrative that allows expansive "sub-narratives" to occur. Shows like Game of Thrones and Gotham are not about simple situations but about the wider world and the struggles within that world. Those shows tend to be about nuances and deconstructions and about the conflicts between different kinds of classes of characters, These shows tend to be about a theme and will explore everything about that theme, with each character "picking a side" in that theme. These shows don't tend to have a singular narrative or one point of view- they have several and while they're expected to converge and conflict, they are largely separate to a degree.

So I feel that ultimately CM was going to fail, especially as the show wore on. The cast turnover wasn't going to help, because that affects chemistry and further "individualizes" the characters.

I also don't really think CM really ever grasped the "team" dynamic. Especially in the later years the agents all just seemed to be "there" and you had no idea why all those characters were needed.

More to the point, you wonder why CM was even conceived as an ensemble in the first place. Did the show need anyone more than just Gideon and maybe Hotch? How complicated is the procedure of criminal profiling in total? This wasn't CSI which CM was designed to emulate- creating a profile needs nothing more than just one person or two people gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion. Why do we need a team of eight as we got to the later seasons? Haven't the showrunners heard of "too many cooks spoil the broth"?

Yeah, a non-ensemble CM would mean a show that probably doesn't have Reid or Morgan or Emily or any of the other supporting characters we may have grown to love...but, think about it. If you took them out- or replaced any of them with Gideon or Hotch- would you really miss much? I don't think so.

I don't think the problem was having more than 2 characters. Their cases were difficult and you can buy a few people were needed to solve them. The problem was the writers didn't know how to write the characters properly, with better writers the show would have been better.

[Danielg342]

8 hours ago, blackwidowxx said:

I don't think the problem was having more than 2 characters. Their cases were difficult and you can buy a few people were needed to solve them. The problem was the writers didn't know how to write the characters properly, with better writers the show would have been better.

I agree that it could take five or six or eight agents to procure the clues and make sense of them, but then I ask- does it take five or six or eight agents to put those clues together and arrive at a solution?

[Mislav]

On 4/6/2021 at 11:42 AM, Couks 16 said:

I really can't stand Rossi I feel like he is fake and he has mediocre acting. I like nothing about him

We get it.

[Couks 16]

I always feel like the odd one out for hating Rossi. Because everywhere I go people adore him. I just don't get the hype around Rossi. I can see why fans love Prentiss because I like her too even though at times they people stan her is annoying but I do like Prentiss. 

Here is another UO. I do not care for the team dynamics in the later seasons because everyone has the blandly agreeable equally friendly relationships. The characters become clones of each other. And they seem to be interchangeable. 

 

My other UO is I loved the dynamics with Gideon. I had no problem with him being the main character. But I am a biased Gideon stan. Gideon is my favourite character. 

Hotch gives Gideon a run for his money in terms of being my favourite character and in terms of being a good profiler at times I would even call Hotch a better profiler than Gideon. 

I like Reid but I don't adore him and he has done some stuff I don't agree with. People on here want more of Reid. But I feel like he is pretty overused

[blackwidowxx]

On 4/21/2021 at 4:16 PM, Couks 16 said:

I always feel like the odd one out for hating Rossi. Because everywhere I go people adore him. I just don't get the hype around Rossi. I can see why fans love Prentiss because I like her too even though at times they people stan her is annoying but I do like Prentiss. 

Here is another UO. I do not care for the team dynamics in the later seasons because everyone has the blandly agreeable equally friendly relationships. The characters become clones of each other. And they seem to be interchangeable. 

 

My other UO is I loved the dynamics with Gideon. I had no problem with him being the main character. But I am a biased Gideon stan. Gideon is my favourite character. 

Hotch gives Gideon a run for his money in terms of being my favourite character and in terms of being a good profiler at times I would even call Hotch a better profiler than Gideon. 

I like Reid but I don't adore him and he has done some stuff I don't agree with. People on here want more of Reid. But I feel like he is pretty overused

I know not everything about Reid was perfect but I can't help it. I have a MGG obsession and he can't do no wrong in my book. 😂

 

[GHScorpiosRule]

I'm not sure if this is unpopular. I came to this show late, well, in its fifth season, and caught up on seasons 1-4 when I was undergoing chemo.

Pardon me if this was already stated (I know from my TWoP days, what I'm about to type was sort of unpopular, but I have such a visceral hate for this character), as I just decided on a rewatch:

I absolutely LOATHE, DESPISE, HATE Erin Fucking Strauss with the heat of a gazillion nuns!*

As far as I'm concerned, there was no need to bring her tight-assed, incompetent (no field experience), ladder climbing ASS to the show. It didn't need the "dramaaa" of it all. There was enough of it with Haley** for Hotch.

Woman had no fucking idea what the B.A.U. does or what the emotional toll it takes on its members. She's nothing but a political hackey bean counter. I always laugh and cackle in "In Name and Blood" when she nearly stumbles over that body and freaks out, only to have Hotch tell her to suck it up.

Yes, I'm mean.

*Fellow TWoP will get this reference.

**I can't stand Haley, either, but it would take pages and pages to explain why and even at TWoP, I had naysayers over the reasons I wasn't sad when she was killed. Yeah, I'm a Hotch fan. He was my favorite.

[LadyIrony]

Where do I start! 

1/ "Criminal Minds" indicates that these people are geniuses. We see little of this on the show. 

2/ In the final ep we see that Rossi can't hit a target not far away on a plane. Blondie feels need to destroy an entire airplane to get bad guy. 

3/ The name Gray Gubler sounds like a Sesame St character. Sorry, it does. 

4/ Apparently none of these geniuses can search the Web like Garcia who seemingly does nothing more than search for local clubs and stores. 

5/ After years of doing the job Garcia still hasn't toughened up to the nature of the job. 

6/ Garcia and Morgan's flirting was nauseating. 

7/ I don't like Garcia. She never grew up just like the Goth chick on NCIS. She wasn't cool either and just inappropriate. I don't believe someone like her would be employed by the FBI. 

 

[callie lee 29]

The Reid heavy storylines (the ones over multiple episodes) were the worst arcs the show had. Maeve, Aubrey Plaza's character, Mexico and being arrested for murder....dumb, overraught, and way too "teenage fangirl" level of drama. 

[kathyk24]

On 1/6/2019 at 12:04 PM, Lalaland said:

Gotta say, I'm with you on this. Absolute Hotch fan, but honestly could not understand the hatred towards the character of Haley. I mean, she put up with ALOT. way back when I was more engaged with the fandom, I had this very debate with a fan. This fan was so vitriolic against Haley, but their arguments were nothing more than superficial naieviety. The idea that she should be thankful  and just shush up because Hotch was handsome, in the FBI and doing a dangerous job, really pissed me off. 

one scene that always annoyed me and made me somewhat annoyed at him, is the scene (can't remember episode). Haley turns up to office as he's going out. Despite much pushing, it takes along time before he 'remembers' his child had a hospital appointment. Even then his 'they can go without me' seemed half hearted, because he knew she would tell him to go, and that would let him off the hook so. I mean, she had a right to be annoyed....did she not? 

I understood why Haley was upset with Hotch after we learned her father had dementia. She's trying to raise a young son and care for an elderly parent while Hotch is traveling with the team. Haley was right to believe that Hotch put the team ahead of their family. She received more focus after she died.

[Danielg342]

On 7/9/2023 at 3:48 PM, callie lee 29 said:

The Reid heavy storylines (the ones over multiple episodes) were the worst arcs the show had. Maeve, Aubrey Plaza's character, Mexico and being arrested for murder....dumb, overraught, and way too "teenage fangirl" level of drama. 

Of all the characters on TV that have been misused the most, Reid is definitely up there. They just kept using him as a proverbial- if not literal- "damsel in distress" out of some idea that we, the audience liked seeing him in peril or something. I know I didn't. I would have much rather seen the boy prodigy grow into a man and be the guy- like in "Damaged"- who outwits the criminals because he knows more about them than they do about themselves. All with his various different quirks, some of which Matthew Gray Gubler himself added to the character.

Really, you probably could write an entire series centred around Reid.

The good news is that if Gubler ever feels like wanting to explore Reid again, and do it properly, he's young enough (43 years old) that he can pursue it. We'll see.

7 hours ago, kathyk24 said:

I understood why Haley was upset with Hotch after we learned her father had dementia. She's trying to raise a young son and care for an elderly parent while Hotch is traveling with the team. Haley was right to believe that Hotch put the team ahead of their family. She received more focus after she died.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the show ever framed Hotch as the "good guy" in his marital problems storyline. Hotch himself knew he was not holding up his end of the bargain and he was often frustrated about his inability to be good at that part of his life. The only real downside to Haley's storyline is that it may have been cruel to kill her off, even though I think the Reaper story was very well told.