It’s interesting to start work on a promo where the show is 14 seasons deep. It’s been going on so long that many of the cast have grown up on the show, and Joe Mantegna’s Just For Men has been dropped for a glistening head of silver hair.
I love delving into the show’s history and unravelling the characters’ backstories, understanding their relationships, and tracing the evolution of their dynamics. The numerous fan-maintained wikis are a goldmine for getting up to speed quickly on long-running series like this.
By this point, the show’s format is firmly established, but I was pleasantly surprised by its production quality. For a series with what must be an intense shooting and post-production schedule, it consistently delivers a polished “crime of the week” structure. Each episode manages to introduce and develop a complex antagonist within a tight runtime, no small feat. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of The X-Files, which, in its more procedural episodes, faced a similar challenge.
One particular hurdle in cutting a promo like this is that it needs to be suitable for pre-watershed viewing, before 9 PM. That restriction can rule out much of what makes the show so compelling: the crimes themselves, the darker investigative details, and sometimes even the criminals.
Working on this promo sent me down a bit of a true-crime rabbit hole. I ended up rewatching both seasons of the brilliant Mindhunter, which I finished just in time for the release of Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which featured a pseudo-crossover-style event with similar scenes and characters from Mindhunter, which sadly just highlighted how much better Mindhunter was. If only Fincher & Netflix would come around to a third season! David, if you can hear this, we’re on our knees!