When it was originally on: 2005-2022, though apparently it reincarnated itself into Criminal Minds: Evolution in 2024 and that’s still going.

Original network: CBS

Where you can stream it now: Hulu or Paramount+ for the whole series apparently Amazon Prime

Had I seen it before: Nope, never seen a single episode.

What IMDb says: The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico helps police solve violent serial crimes using profiling. Team members analyze evidence and psychology to catch unknown subjects, but their demanding work affects personal lives.

Why I picked it: Criminal Minds is not exactly a prestige show or a critical darling, but damn, it’s been on forever and everyone I’ve known who likes this show freaking loves it. It’s also the CBS procedural where I can think of people that are my age who are. into it.

What I liked: It’s entertaining enough, and moves at a pretty fast pace. I can see how that sucks people into it, but I’m having trouble coming up with much else.

What I didn’t like: The big thing a police procedural has to do in a pilot is explain why it’s not like the other police procedurals. The big gimmick here is that we’re focusing on a Behavioral Analysis Unit. I guess there’s a version of that which could work, but the struggle here is I just don’t see how “we have an overly educated guess that the criminal is a white dude in his 20s” helps solve a crime any faster. I’m left wondering what value any of these people are adding to an investigation and why I should care. Maybe the problem is that enough has changed since 2005 for “lonely incel type” to not feel like much of a curveball, and therefore not particularly impressive that this team profiled the guy correctly. But yeah, feeling like our central characters aren’t meaningfully adding to the investigation at hand breaks the procedural.

Another struggle I have here is that the pilot doesn’t really establish meaningful differences between the characters. A lot of these people don’t feel like real people yet. From what I can tell, Reid is a fan-favorite, but in the pilot he’s not a character so much as a lazy exposition device, built to spit out whatever context is needed to keep the audience in the loop all while having it framed as a charming personality quirk. Another character’s entire personality seems to just be “likes women.” Ideally a show like this makes everyone feel unique as people, and they each make uiique contributions to the overall team. Here it felt like you could probably replace the team they have one good dynamic duo and the show wouldn’t lose anything

Do I want to watch Ep. 2?: Not really. Police procedurals aren’t really my thing anyway, and even if they were, there’s others I’d reach for over this.