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I had to deal with an organization that was still in a way Hoover didn't die," and where people didn't necessarily see the point of talking to criminals who'd already been caught. Like Holden and Bill, he worked "10-, 12-hour days, traveling 150 days a year," he said. "The battle that they're having is very similar. I joined the FBI I'm working on a master's degree," and went on to earn another master's and a doctorate and to write a string of books. When I was in the service, I was going to college.
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The personal lives may be fictional - in the show, Holden is single and in a complicated relationship with a pot-smoking student named Debbie (Hannah Gross), while Douglas was married and became a father during the same period - but the former agent sees a lot of himself in Groff's character. The pair are shown in the first season partnering with an academic, Wendy Carr (Anna Torv, Fringe), to develop the study of serial offenders that in real life became Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, coauthored by Douglas, Ressler, and Ann W.
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Holden and Bill are fictional characters based on Douglas - who retired from the bureau in the mid-1990s but who, at 72, continues to work as a speaker, writer, and independent investigator - and the late Robert K. Mindhunter stars Groff ( Looking, Glee), a Lancaster County native, and Holt McCallany ( Lights Out) as FBI Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench, whose pioneering research into what makes serial killers tick begins with interviews with some of America's most notorious monsters, including Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) and Richard Speck (Jack Erdie).Īnd yet the show's not so much about the monsters as it is about the people who study them, and the toll that research takes. Not surprisingly, Douglas made an exception for the addictive, 1970s-set Netflix drama from David Fincher ( House of Cards, Zodiac) inspired by Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, the memoir Douglas wrote with Mark Olshaker. "When you're working real cases, you don't have that scary music in the background," he said, laughing. It's just crazy," Douglas said Wednesday. "They have the profilers taking over investigations, knocking down doors, pulling their gun, breaking the rules in an investigation, not Mirandizing, and it's just over the top and aggravates me."Īnd then there are the soundtracks. In most shows and movies, "the way they make the bad guys, the way the make the serial killers … they're like magicians, some of them. Douglas - the model for Jonathan Groff's character in Mindhunter - has spent a long career talking to serial killers, and he thinks the Netflix series is different, too. I may be a wimp, but former FBI Agent John E. Yet last weekend, I binged the entire first season of Netflix's new serial-killer profiling drama Mindhunter, all while telling myself it wasn't like those other stories - even if it was the story that in some ways made those other stories possible. You'd probably have to tie me to a chair to get me to watch CBS's Criminal Minds, whose early episodes I found so deeply unpleasant I've been back only when it was necessary for work.Īnd I quickly came to loathe that critics' darling, Hannibal, the Bryan Fuller prequel to The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, whose corpse presentations, I once wrote, "could be ripped from old issues of Gourmet magazine, if Gourmet had featured cannibalism." It didn't help that episodes had cutesy names like "Aperitif" and "Amuse-Bouche." Call me crazy, but I prefer not to see serial killers hosting horrific dinner parties. I'm so much of a wimp that I've never seen Jonathan Demme's Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs - as much as I'd like to see Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins face off - because the Thomas Harris novel gave me nightmares. Sooner or later, a serial-killer story was going to catch me.