Criminal Minds: An Analysis

[@micaiahborchers8914]

I enjoy Criminal Minds because it's clever (or at least, seasons 1-10 were), well-acted, and compelling. I love the characters and I love their stories. What I don't enjoy is the frequent misuse of the words "psychotic" and "psychopath" (which is not even a clinical term), or the phrase "alpha male" thrown around like it's an actual thing anyone can be and not something insecure men made up. I think it is fair to criticize the show for demonizing mentally ill people/those who've been abused, but a few episodes do deal with this and the character of Reid's mom, a perfectly harmless but sick woman, is there to help balance it out.

[@anthony..5737]

It’s really difficult to engage with media like this. It seems so normal and yet on some level it is state propaganda and is indoctrinating people. I think that’s why videos like this are important

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Thank you so much for watching!!

[@jamesmason3734]

What I hate about shows like this is they also tend to be ableist, they often give neruodivergent/mentally ill traits to the villians and use police techniques that are designed against neruodivergent people (like reading every small action someone does)

[@amandagoldsbury8122]

Considering that a lot of the main characters share these traits, I'm not sure who exactly you think is being vilified. Penelope is ADHD, Reid is autistic, Aaron is OCD, Rossi even calls himself a narcissist ect.....

[@matthiasnagorski8411]

​@@amandagoldsbury8122I guess that's an intriguing aspect of the show. The mains end up having comparable stories to some of the villains. Abuse, neglect, trauma, "disorders", et cetera. I'm not a fan of copaganda, and this show can feel ridiculously dry at times, but I do appreciate the way that characters reflect each other. I keep coming back to it. It's one of the only shows my wife and I can agree to watch on a nightly basis. In a way, the dryness of the dialogue almost makes it better. The characters feel like people who don't really feel comfortable associating with other people, and they're all sort of pantomiming social interactions until they actually form friendships. Which is what all humans do. But neurodivergent people seem to think about the processes more than neurotypical people. I've also started seriously accepting the possibility that I'm autistic, and this new perspective may be influencing how I feel about this particular show.

[@amandagoldsbury8122]

@@matthiasnagorski8411 There's an episode somewhere when Aaron is facing down an unsub and he mentions the statistics of people who grow up in abuse that continue the cycle, but he also gives a aggressively better argument that those who have gone thru it sometimes grow up to fight against it. And it's that choice that makes him/you/me/ the people who fight against it stronger than the abuser.

[@mercytellez8065]

I love this video! I have an ongoing (like two years now) hyperfixation on this show and about a year or maybe two back I wrote an essay on the propaganda on this show when addressing mental disorders or addiction, its hard to come across video essays about this show so thank you for making this!

[@ashleyfink5845]

Interesting video! I almost didn’t watch it, since I’m in the early seasons of the show and have been genuinely enjoying it. I was worried that watching this video would ruin the show for me. However, the fact that that was my first thought gave me a bit of pause, and made me want to lean into the discomfort. Why was I so worried that the fantasy of the show would be broken if I looked at it too closely? You gave a wonderful analysis, and this video was very thought-provoking. It kind of gave me a personal epiphany: Consuming content for escapism is fine, but it should be done in moderation and with awareness of what the content promotes.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

I was rewatching some of the earlier seasons today myself! I'm really glad you decided to give it a watch!

[@BrokenDarkFire]

You hit the nail on the head re: something I’ve never connected the dots on before, and that’s how CM is a fantasy. Post 9/11, we DEFINITELY wanted the fantasy that smart heroes existed and were going to save us from our ever-present anxiety. You laid this out so well, and I feel like I have a whole new insight on this show now. This show and Bones had such a chokehold on me as a teenager I almost majored in forensic science. It’ll be interesting to go back and watch CM now!

[@EnLaLuna23]

I don’t normally agree with British people-especially the average British take on American political culture-but u kinda ate that up! I haven’t watched criminal minds in years and am now watching the reboot & seasons I’ve missed; there’s sooo many levels to the copaganda.

[@andie4890]

this video was well made, congratulations… i also have a weird relationship with this show because i enjoy it, but also find it infuriating at times. i think it is my appreciation for the actors that made it so appealing. i don’t like the fbi but i like these characters? sometimes media confuses me.

[@masteroftheart5548]

The reviewing art as diagnostic reminds me of the Otto Dix quote “all art is exorcism.” But yes I love the breakdown of Criminal minds and reminds me of a project I keep telling myself I’ll work on to break down the instances in CSI where people ask for a warrant to see if asking for a warrant had a chance to significantly increase your likelihood of being the murderer.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Asking for law enforcement to obey the law and respect rights is so often coded as a red flag in these shows.

[@masteroftheart5548]

If you are innocent you don’t need your rights leads swiftly to if you demand your rights you must be guilty of something.

[@louisacoote2337]

Also, all the episodes directed by Matthew Grey Gubler ( who played Reid) are disturbing/terrifying!

[@tape-6]

my sister and a bunch of friends have gotten into this show over the last few months so ive become a little familiar with it but something about this show makes me feel ill when i watch it too long. i think lots of it is how the only characters with any forms of psychosis or schizoaffective disorders are murderers and as someone whose understanding of their own mental illness has been developing i just. cant get past that. the show throws in slight nods at how haaard the murderers have it but in the end, thats not what sticks with an audience. what sticks with the audience is that the "unsub" has paranoia and struggles to look people in the eye and maybe hears things and also kills and rapes people and theres really no getting away from that

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

One of the most troubling things about the show is its constant demonisation of people with mental health issues and I absolutely think it perpetuates the completely false link between mental illness and violence. Thank you for watching!

[@FuchsiaNeko]

@@goranorsolic1000 I mean. Not all killers/criminals have a history of abuse. Of of the top of my head, I know Donald Harvey, who killed at least 37 people while working in hospitals and got away with it for years, had no history of abuse or mental illness and was always seen as a normal person. He was never found legally insane; of course, it could just be very well hidden or there's info that no one ever knew about, but that's all semantics. A lot of killers aren't mentally stable, but to say ALL of them are I think is a bold statement.

[@FuchsiaNeko]

@@goranorsolic1000 I'm just saying legally insane. Yes there's always something wrong with a serial killer lol, it's just that it can be hard to pinpoint just exactly what went wrong in the person's brain.

[@riddle.me.this.]

“a perfectly benevolent panopticon” is the best and the weirdest way i’ve ever heard someone describe penelope garcia the head of the office of supreme genius

[@louisacoote2337]

I got into Criminal Minds just as it was ending. I think the characters are really interesting ( on their own or in various pairings/dynamics), the murders etc really interesting for the most part, lots of gripping finales and over-arching plot episodes and some focusing on a particular character. The quotes framing the episode were very appealing to me too. My favourite characters are Garcia, Hotch and Reid. Alex Blake and Tara Lewis are awesome too.

[@meyruiz4225]

Loved this video! This is one of my favorite shows, and this video has led me to view it into a much needed new light. Great content!

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

I am so glad you enjoyed it!

[@atmoravi]

I wish someone would do same thing for Russian tv shows... I like "Criminal minds" and I agree with you. There are still many things around the main theme that are good to acknowledge. Like the roots of violence and all the psychology behind human trauma.

[@dylangilbert5934]

I always appreciated how the show never tried to glorify the killers like how Netflix made Bundy, and Damher look like protagonists.

[@Nocturnalux]

It still turns its serial killer into super people. It has to, otherwise the team can’t be amazing nor the chase compelling. They are always going on about the amazing skillset the killers have. It is part of a very American tradition.

[@JayKay-lk7qp]

but thats more the case with the two parter​s or big known serial killers, they sven belittle a lot of the seriel killers that only appear once in the show @@Nocturnalux

[@FuchsiaNeko]

Criminal Minds has always freaked me out, but there was a time when I enjoyed watching it (and I still do like seeing character interactions between the main characters. Reid is cute). A couple of years ago the morbid curiosity died down; I dropped it since I realized that, while I enjoy horror, I'm just not good with torture. Plus I've just grown tired of how little crime shows tend to imitate real-life investigations. It makes me sad tbh Also as I've been trying to work through my own mental problems through the past couple years, I've been uneasy thinking about the portrayal of mental illness in this show... (though like i said, I haven't seen it in years)

[@virz4432]

The torture part is uselessly morbid. Apart from that, the imitation of real life cases to me is disrespectful to the real victims of such crimes (or similar) and their families. I prefer more fictional (more creative but not absurdly unreal) cases for the shows, it conveys the same type of story without offending or disrespecting the real victims and their families.

[@BeautifulEarthJa]

You're outro music is so good

[@laborkyle]

it's good folks, the video.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

As always, thank you 😭

[@lyannastarkweather]

I was an avid watcher of CM when I was in high school, which coincided with the peak of the show (seasons 3-8 ish). The show was more successful in holding my interest than its contemporaries, mostly because I latched onto the “found family” dynamics of the BAU. I eventually fell off of the show because the violence of it made me paranoid. I recently started a rewatch as an adult and I could see the post-9/11 lionizing of the series Feds all over it.

[@saradiart5994]

Thank you very much for this analysis. I enjoyed it to see how you demonstrate what I have only read from Zizek in theory.

[@chelsealynch3327]

That man is a Marxist he shouldn’t be taken seriously

[@radreads3269]

Really, really enjoyed this!!! 👏🏽👏🏽

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

♥️

[@Reflexzzzz]

Excellent video, quality is up there with much larger channels, you deserve success! The lighting did go haywire at 10:00 though

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Thank you! (And yes, I noticed it in editing when it was too late to reshoot 😭😭)

[@dillonfabianfallil1942]

So Panopticon is defined as “a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.” You’re welcome….

[@Mexie]

Haven’t seen this show but many like it.. fantastic analysis as always!

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

As always, thank you so much for watching 😭

[@Nocturnalux]

Criminal Minds is utterly absurd. You can trace the tradition of the super intelligent serial killer at least as far back as Silent of the Lambs. CM’s villains are hyped, collectively they can hack everything, have a vast amount of knowledge and can do almost anything. This means that the team that catches them is even smarter, yeah! But the crimes are ao over the top that I find it hilarious. Woman grinds healthy men into manure so as to grow crops that will cure her of a skin condition she doesn’t even have but has hallucinated out of nowhere. The boss unsubs take this to a whole new level. Mister Scratch can use drugs to convince people with dissociative issues that they are killers and lo and behold, under this new persona they kill. It is hilariously impossible. You can tell the writers kept adding details to make each case always be more over the top than the previous. Dude isolates the rabies pathogen so as to infect people and watch. One who removes the blood of healthy people and introduces them to unhealthy ones, also feeding them animals with a very long life span so as to become immortal…and on and on it goes. You are very right in that you cannot quite trace the reasoning. And at times that, too, becomes absurd. Emily, at one point, looks at a map where the casualties up until then are marked. She goes, “Three points make a triangle”, which is both obvious as silly. If another victim pops out, as happens almost always, then you won’t have a triangle.

[@Nocturnalux]

@@tvguy61 There is a difference between “some disbelief” and “utterly bonkers”. CM leans heavily into the latter, often being perplexingly absurd.

[@gwenmccaw2364]

Hello! First of all, love this video and love your work. This is really quite well done and I really like your style! Second, I was curious as to your thoughts on my friends' and my interpretation of why we like the show. We consider ourselves within some spectrum of progressives to leftists, but most of us really enjoy CM from a standpoint of comfort TV, as you've noticed in both your video essay and in the comments. Most of us are horror fans, and we generally view this show as horror fiction series much more than a police procedural, particularly given how some of the villains tend almost supernatural or impossibly evil. I've often felt like it scratches a similar itch as the villain from the movie "Hush" with the scale and variance of the villains it creates and addresses. Obviously, the series is a work of political apologia, for the police, feds, and military, and is intended to be a "high brow," I suppose, police procedural, but your (really insightful) discussion of genre reminded me of that, and I wanted to share. All in all, really great work, and I'm excited to see more of what you do!

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Honestly I think a lot of the show (especially episodes or sequences from the killer's POV) is absolutely shot like a horror movie and that strict formal stylism lends itself to reassuringly familiar structure, it absolutely scratches that itch so I totally know what you mean. And thank you so much for watching!

[@gabriellef3351]

This show,...i was a young adult recovering from abuse when it launched and i hated the show's way of sexualizing violence to women. And how the brainy characters were such caricatures. If you can get past its tropey lazy writing it can be fun guilty tv. Just accept it's in a different universe and none of the real world rules apply

[@jessekos1859]

Thought-provoking as usual 👍🏻

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Really appreciate you taking the time to watch

[@hareemqureshi822]

Only at the intro but I'm really hyped for this series 👌

[@wordsofdv]

Brilliant video.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Thank you so much for watching

[@ephraimduke]

Lol this was one of my favourite copaganda shows from the early 2000s along with CSI (all of them ), Law and Order and Castle but I got really sick of this genre when even Zombies (iZombie) & literal Satan (Lucifer) also became of assisted US law enforcement. Like there are way too many of these types of fucking shows . Like a dystopian amount.

[@dusty1512]

On season 7, enjoy watching this show as an Eng Lit major

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

It's compulsive!

[@Nocturnalux]

@@JonTheLitCritGuyI think this is why it becomes more and more absurd as seasons progress. It is very repetitive so it has to up the ante. Cannibalism is not enough, you need someone who got a special set of mental dentures, another one who forces his victims to consume human flesh as well. It is absurd and I find it hilarious. You can tell writers kept adding to each story, making it as convoluted as possible, because they have already pretty much done everything already. Mister Scratch and the like are also part of this need, along with trying to push for a greater sense of narrative coherence.

[@saint_silver]

Really reminding me Hari Kunzru's Red Pill

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

I've been meaning to read that for a while

[@BLoafX]

How come in the movie #Trap they had 5,000 members of SWAT and PPD but the BAU barely gets 30

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Asking the right question!!

[@Redmanticore]

alright. hard to start. it has silly episodes. but still. 0:55 ill start this. for the record, they should have just paid Mandy Patinkin. he was the star of the show In season 1. even most fun, haven't seen anything that tried even to pretend to be deep. even if I bought to my mental health Finnish professional mother all of them in blu-ray, and she watched and hates it. even if I love it. and I understand her life-long professional mental health view. she said - as watched all of the seasons mind you - that she cried many times, how she _wished_ things were like this. simple. somebody came from the sky. like Mcdonalds, packaged, fixed, right, and went away. in the end, is not confusion. but epiphanies. it is a fantasy. after mandy, no real characters. it would be used if it were real. 18:29 it is?

[@GaasubaMeskhenet]

I appreciate the visuals but it would be very helpful if you said what the visual was instead of just calling it "this"

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Great feedback, thank you! I'll make sure I keep that in mind for the future

[@JohntheDuncan]

Rude to put incisive analysis after a bad take on banan bread. I'm seething over here

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

fine, send me your fave banana bread recipes :)

[@lessevilnyarlathotep1595]

@@JonTheLitCritGuy im really late here but: 2 and a half cups of sugar (2 white and half brown) 200 gr of softened room temp butter 3 eggs, room temp 2 bananas, mashed cake flour 4? cups (i dont measure flour) 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon pinch of salt optional: chopped brazilian nuts or dark chocolate beat sugar and butter until fluffy. add eggs, incorporate one at a time. add mashed bananas, cinnamon, vanilla extract, salt and baking soda. add flour and mix until it reaches consistency of cake batter (do it manually so you dont overmix). add any toppings you want at this point. pour mixture into a greased loaf pan (you can optionally sprinkle some sugar in there so it caramelizes) and in it goes into a preheated 180 celcius oven for 30 min or until its coloured a dark golden brown. test with a toothpick or a knife if you're not sure. if you run a knife down the sides between the banana bread and the pan while its still warm, you can take it out without leaving a whole chunk in there by accident. okay ive been writing for 20 minutes now this is way too long im going now bye

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

@@lessevilnyarlathotep1595 thank you for your service o7

[@TheJayman213]

Stopped watching Criminals maybe 10ish seasons in. Stopped watching Elementary after season 2 at the latest. Stopped watching Luther in season 3 I think 🙈

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Criminal Minds lasting 15 years is just mind blowing

[@hedleybutler9706]

Historicise to look through history's eyes👀 😎 I'm not going to apologize for that👆

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

nor should you :)))

[@99jdave99]

why is the camera blurry so much? Particularly in the first half of part 1. It's pretty distracting lol, pulled me out enough to leave a comment about it. The other stuff with the "filmy/cassette" (such as the intro, or the second half of part 2) effects were fine, because they were obviously artistic, but the blurriness is confusing since it comes off as poor video quality unless you consciously think about it. Even part 2 has a kinda blurry look, so it seriously has me wondering if your camera lense was blurry when you recorded this, if you applied the effect at least subtly in the entire thing, or if the camera quality isn't high (I checked against other 1080p videos even, to see if my mind was tripping me up somehow).. Technical gripes(?) aside, good video. I'd recommend checking out the copaganda series by skip intro for anyone who's interested in seeing more content about cop-TV-show's reflection of societal trends etc. and creating propaganda for them.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Hey, thank you for watching. And yeah, one of the downsides of only having a phone to work with is that sometimes the field of focus can be a little wonky. I'll make sure the next one is better!

[@justforepic]

great vid. you're long winded af bro

[@Leftistattheparty]

[@leonriker4997]

i cant watch crime shows it just triggers my hatred of capitalism. we should blame systems not people.

[@bobbycoleman-co7mc]

Tell that to people that have lost loved ones to killers like the ones on these shows. The world isn’t black and white. You can blame both.

[@chelsealynch3327]

Your hatred of capitalism the system who has lifted hundreds of people out of poverty in the world. Please go back to your Marxist utopia and leave the rest of us alone. We don’t need to envy the rich for what we don’t have, we can make capitalism work for all.

[@chelsealynch3327]

Blame systems that are designed to keep the order and structure in our society???!?

[@leonriker4997]

@@chelsealynch3327 they dont do that they do the opposite

[@discocommunist]

@@chelsealynch3327 yes because the order and structure are inherently flawed and should be discarded

[@99wattr89]

Wow, this show sounds awful.

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

It's quite something

[@99wattr89]

@@JonTheLitCritGuy Did you enjoy it despite the authoritarian propaganda, or was it more of a curiosity?

[@JonTheLitCritGuy]

Honestly? Kind of a bit of both...

[@99wattr89]

@@JonTheLitCritGuy I've been there with a few shows in the past. Thanks for the interesting discussion on it. :)