Missing Mindhunter? This 18-year-old crime thriller scratches the same itch

If you, like me, find most police procedurals blur into one another — case-of-the-week, a bit of banter, baddie cuffed by the credits — then you probably understand why David Fincher’s Mindhunter was so refreshing. Unlike shows that just race through shocking cases or pile on gore, Mindhunter is obsessed with the psychology behind criminal acts. It’s about the FBI’s early attempts to pick apart how serial killers think, building up their famous profiling methods by sitting down with the worst of the worst to study every twitch and half-sentence for clues into their minds.

But look, with Mindhunter in a long hibernation (despite all those swirling rumours about a possible film continuation), what’s meant to fill that particular gap? Oddly enough, The Mentalist — a CBS drama that ran from the late noughties well into the streaming era — is the one show I’ve found that dives into the same psychological territory, albeit with its own blend of charm and American gloss.

The Mentalist aired for seven seasons and 151 episodes between 2008 and 2015.

Profilers with Style — and Flaws

Bruno Heller (who would go on to create Gotham) delivered The Mentalist back in 2008, before the phrase “prestige TV” had really gone mainstream. It’s set in Sacramento and orbits around Patrick Jane, a consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation played by Simon Baker. Jane’s hardly your average TV crime solver — he’s a former fake psychic who made a living by reading people, only to drop the act after a serial killer called Red John violently crashed into his personal life. Now he works with law enforcement, deploying those same observational skills to dismantle suspects in interrogation rooms and at blood-spattered crime scenes.

If you loved Mindhunter for its Methodical Battles of Wills, where agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench wrangled with murderers in stuffy interview rooms, you’ll see shades of that in Jane’s approach. His big trick is reading people, clocking micro-expressions, posture, nervous tics, the whole lot — sometimes using hypnosis or his version of neurolinguistic programming to draw out confessions, as if nicking a page from Ford’s playbook twenty-odd years on. Jane’s always on the lookout for tiny details — say, an out-of-place item on a shelf or badly buttoned jacket. Every little thing is a puzzle piece, another chance to get inside a criminal’s mind.

A Different Flavour of Darkness

Of course, for every surface similarity, there’s a pile of differences. Don’t go in expecting Fincher’s stark, ominous pacing or Netflix levels of brutality. The Mentalist is very much a network TV show in that slightly lighter, brighter, more formulaic American way — tidy resolutions, a bit of witty repartee, commercial breaks lurking at every beat. Each episode tends to revolve around one new murder, and Jane solves it using his unique psychological toolkit. It’s considerably breezier, by the standards of grim-faced crime shows, rather more digestible after a long day.

Still, there’s real bite when it matters. Instead of just flitting from one case to another, The Mentalist’s plots are threaded through with Jane’s obsession: catching Red John, the serial killer who destroyed his family as punishment for Jane’s public “profiling” stunt. If you want a string to tug you from one season to the next, that underlying vendetta does the trick — and Red John’s shadow looms large even as Jane is solving garden-variety crimes on the side. More than once, his recklessness and provocations put the rest of the team (and himself) in the firing line, complicating what otherwise might have felt routine.

• Mindhunter focuses on the late-70s FBI, pioneering criminal profiling through first-hand interviews with actual serial killers.
• The Mentalist is set in contemporary California, with Patrick Jane using psychological manipulation and sharp observation to assist cops, having previously been a fake psychic.
• Both series centre on understanding criminal motives and psychological tension, but Mindhunter is based on true events and real murderers, while The Mentalist’s villains are inventions (Red John included).

So while it might not have Netflix sheen or a baritone-voiced David Fincher at the controls, The Mentalist offers another go at crime-solving via the mind, not just the evidence bags. If that’s what you dig, and you’ve got room for another seven-season procedural in your life, it’s a decent substitute while Mindhunter bides its time.