By Jessi Walker
Criminal Minds saddened many when its final episode was aired on February 19th of 2020, after 15 seasons of runtime on CBS. The show had 324 episodes total across these fifteen seasons, and had millions across the country tuning in to watch the team of FBI profilers solve cases. The show’s cancellation was short lived, as now the show is returning on Paramount Plus as Criminal Minds: Evolution this Thanksgiving. While many are happy to see the return of the show, this is an opportunity to look back on the legacy of the show and analyze the flaws of the television show, and the less talked about issues surrounding it.
Criminal Minds is “Copaganda”
Criminal Minds has always been a show about a team of FBI profilers traveling all across the country to stop dangerous criminals, most often serial killers, using their behavior analysis skills and their unique, intelligent strategies to put them behind bars. It is a part of a large category of shows that are considered cop propaganda, or copaganda for short, for many different reasons. Copaganda is a type of media that portrays law enforcement in favorable ways to the public, and in Criminal Minds case, this type of law enforcement was FBI agents. Copaganda within the show portrays the FBI agents, and sometimes other police officers present, as kindhearted individuals who just want to protect the community and excuse their flaws and bad practices sometimes present in the show by humanizing the agent doing the actions.
There are often very little repercussions for the agents on the show, and this can be seen early on in the show’s history. Elle Greenaway ends her time as a part of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, or BAU, team after killing an unarmed suspect, and while she does quit, she doesn’t face many repercussions, and leading up to her actions, she was showing a lot of signs of being unwell that the team let fester without much intervention. Aaron Hotchner beat a man, known as Foyet, inside of his home after Foyet killed his wife, and while it is understandable Hotch had so much rage, it is still twisted that he was able to get away from consequences when he did that after a few rounds of questioning of him and his team. The team had received some criticism later on from Strauss, the BAU section chief, when Hotch made a questionable decision on his case involving a college student and a serial killer making contact at the end of the episode. Strauss suspended Hotch temporarily, and she began overseeing the team on their field missions despite being a person who mostly stayed behind the desk.
Strauss was treated like a villain, demonized even more than some of the killers on the show, and she was well hated by the team and the viewers alike because of the criticism she had towards the BAU and their questionable practices. From the beginning of the case, it is clear that Strauss was being portrayed as weak and inexperienced to try to invalidate the points she made, as she immediately antagonized the detectives and seemed visibly upset about the state of the body which reeked as unprofessional compared to the great agents of the BAU. Strauss tried to prevent Prentiss from knocking on the door of the suspect’s and his child’s home when a witness was inside, but the team disobeyed and she went inside regardless, which worked in the team’s favor, so Strauss was proven wrong, and she even admitted to it even while clinging to her bureaucratic reasonings.
However, while the show does glamorize law enforcement, especially FBI agents with their magical profiling abilities, the show does show some criticism to cops. Often in the show, the suspect is a police officer and they point out how the job inherently attracts sociopaths, psychopaths, and aggressors. Criminal Minds does place a spotlight on these issues that other crime procedural shows fail to point out at all, which is at least something.
The Show’s Stigmatization of Mental Health
One of the most obvious elements of the show that viewers pick up on while watching it is how the show chooses to portray certain mental disorders. This was an inherent issue with almost all of the episodes of the show, as every “Unsub” had some variant of mental health issues, and the show often put the blame on their disorders. For example, schizophrenia was often demonized on the show, and was one of the most used conditions used to pinpoint the killers. One of the most infamous storylines of this appears when Elle Greenaway was on a train back home in the episode entitled “Derailed”. In the episode, a man with paranoid schizophrenia was on a train ride with his doctor to speak at a conference on psychosis. Elle Greenaway’s presence triggered an episode of his to occur, which caused him to kill a security guard and hold the whole train hostage. This violent portrayal of schizophrenics is not as common as the show tried to portray—schizophrenics are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to be the perpetrators, and are usually more dangerous to themselves than to others around them. The show often relied on violent, stereotypical portrayals of schizophrenics that harmed the perception of people with schizophrenia in the public eye. The media representation of schizophrenia had caused further stigmatization of the disorder, which had made it harder for those struggling to want help for their issues and also destroyed support systems for those who deal with the illness.
Schizophrenia is not the only disorder that Criminal Minds had done this to, as it had also treated Dissociative Identity Disorder the same way. Dissociative Identity Disorder is another misunderstood, under acknowledged disorder that was negatively affected by the media representation. The show still referred to the disorder as Multiple Personality Disorder, which had been an inaccurate name since 1994, and tried to portray personalities, or alters, within people who had DID as violent. One of the most famous examples of this on the show is when Spencer Reid, a fan favorite agent in the show, was kidnapped by a man named Tobias Hankel. Tobias Hankel was diagnosed as having Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the way the show chose to portray it was awful. The switches from one alter to another was done in such a cheesy, inaccurate way that was way too rapid compared to the real disorder which made it look like a joke. The show also tried to claim Hankel formed alters later in life when his father died, when that is impossible because alters must originally form before the fundamental ages of seven to nine years old. It negatively affected the treatment of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder in society because of this misrepresentation. Similar to schizophrenia, DID sufferers are more likely to experience violence than to be violent themselves, as they were victims of horrific trauma in their childhood and that creates a cycle effect in a person with these issues. Dissociative Identity Disorder is nothing like what Criminal Minds was going for with Tobias Hankel, and this is true for many of the other disorders stigmatized on the show like Schizophrenia, Drug Addiction, OCD, PTSD, and more. While the show was entirely fictional, it is still true that society is greatly influenced by the media around them on real issues.
Consensus
This does not mean that you cannot enjoy Criminal Minds; in fact, it is one of my favorite shows of all time. I have fond memories of the television show scaring me to death when I was a child when my mother and older siblings were obsessed with it, and when I was innocent enough to think those kinds of crimes only happened in the show. I enjoyed my watch through of almost all of the seasons when I was older and decided to learn the story of it and why my family loved it so much. I came to love all of the agents of the show such as Reid and Garcia, and enjoyed rooting for them to take down the “Unsubs” in the episodes. In fact, I plan to watch the new reboot on Paramount Plus entitled Criminal Minds: Evolution when it comes out this Thanksgiving as much as I can possibly cram into the break in between seeing family and eating real food again unlike college food. It is okay to consume and enjoy problematic media, as long as you recognize the issues within it, and educate those who might not recognize those issues. With the reboot coming out, I think this is a great time to reflect on all of these things, and consider reflecting on other media you watch. I hope the reboot deals with these issues better, but I will still enjoy the thrill of the crime procedural show regardless.