Patrick Freyne: These Criminal Minds folks are no craic. They look and sound as if they work for Accenture

Whenever I watch Criminal Minds (Disney+) and then try to write about it I end up thinking far too much about the A-Team. So let me clear my mind and try to write about Criminal Minds one more time.

Hannibal is the leader of the A-Team. He is a cigar-chomping, safari-suit-wearing silver fox who dresses up in fancy disguises and loves it “when a plan comes together”. Murdock is a wacky baseball-hatted military pilot with post-traumatic stress disorder whose friends keep breaking him out of mental institutions and have nicknamed him Howling Mad Murdock. BA Baracus is a grump with a mohawk and the type of dungarees a toddler wears. He is so deathly frightened of planes that he must be rendered unconscious with a blow to the head before flying. (There’s a definite issue with mental-health policies in the A-Team workplace; Hannibal should probably be sent to do a course.) And, finally, Face, a man whose whole personality is that he is handsome. Look at my byline picture and say to my face that this has never happened.

I’d better get back to Criminal Minds…

The A-Team have their problems: 1. They are being pursued by the US government for a crime they did not commit; 2. They live in a van; 3. Though they have loads of guns they have terrible aim, and I don’t think they’ve murdered even one measly baddie; 4. After several seasons of indiscriminate gunplay it seems increasingly possible that maybe they did commit the crime mentioned in item 1.

I can totally see why people would hire the A-Team if they were looking for mercenaries. They’re magnetic. I can picture some depraved warlord searching the dark web, landing on the A-Team’s GeoCities page and thinking, “They’ve got a cool van. They look like fun! Yes, my previous thugs had a brute cruelty that was very effective, but I like how these guys make me feel. Yes, I shall seize the capital with Hannibal and his merry band!”

[ Like Scooby-Doo and The A-Team, Dermot Bannon is up there with the best crime-solving TV shows ]

Sadly, the A-Team prefer to work pro bono for helpless villagers, which doesn’t pay as well as guarding an oil pipeline for a despot. I’m pretty sure, now I think of it, that the “plan” of which Hannibal spoke earlier isn’t so much a “business plan” as a napkin drawing of four stickmen with guns that reads: “Me shoot baddies with pals!” That said, they may be profitable. I haven’t seen the A-Team’s accounts. No member of the A-Team looks like the kind of person who can do accounts.

Everyone in Criminal Minds feels like the sort of person who can do accounts. I think that might be why, though their serial-killer hunting shtick is compelling, I default to the A-Team when I try to think about them. In their casual chinos, sports jackets and pantsuits, the Criminal Minds gang have “good Leaving Cert” written all over them. (The A-Team have “went back to college as mature students for a bit” written all over them.) The Criminal Minds folks are no craic. For the most part they look and sound as if they work for Accenture.

Which is weird, because each week on Criminal Minds the members of the FBI’s behavioural-analysis unit use behavioural psychology and the power of the American surveillance state to foil serial killers. (The United States is absolutely rotten with serial killers as far as I can gather from this show; it’s bigger than littering.) That sounds like the type of thing you’d want to wear dungarees or be broken out of a mental institution for.

Criminal Minds was cancelled by CBS in 2020, then picked up by Paramount+. (It’s on Disney+ in Ireland.) That’s after 15 years of popularity on network television. Apparently, the snootier streamers are hungry for once-unfashionable crime procedurals. The new seasons are called Criminal Minds: Evolution, indicating, perhaps, that its audience is now one that believes in evolution.

A typical episode of Criminal Minds begins with a grisly torture or murder and ends with our heroic technocrats surprising the perpetrator, usually while in the act of disembowelling someone, or maybe enucleating them. (This is a new word for eye-gouging I learned on Criminal Minds.) Don’t get me wrong. Criminal Minds can be fun. And these are the parts that make Criminal Minds fun: the enucleations.

He’d never get away with having a name like Rusty Savage in an Irish town or workplace. He’d have to change it or move or become a politician or the kind of local ‘character’ who hangs around chip shops

I also like the bits where they phone their eccentric computer-whizz colleague and she uses a huge bank of high-tech screens to do a Google search because the other characters don’t know computers. (I assume she’s their granddaughter even though that’s biologically impossible.) It’s fun to me too that they travel from crime scene to crime scene by private jet, such is the depth of the serial-killing problem across North America (a much more pressing threat than climate change). It’s also probably why so many people want to defund the police. Everything was simpler when our heroes were self-employed gunmen who lived in a van.

For the most part the behavioural-analysis unit (and their audience) are pretty blase about all the senseless torture and death they’ve seen, but in the new series the Papa Smurf of the group (white-bearded Joe Mantegna) has started hallucinating a former serial-killing tormentor. This feels like a healthy psychological breakthrough, to be honest. They’ve seen so much violence that all of them should really be tripping balls all the time. To make matters worse, the aforementioned former tormentor is also working with them, Hannibal Lecter style (not Hannibal A-Team style), from prison as they track down a villain named Gold Star. But, sadly, he isn’t very like Hannibal Lecter, in so far as you feel he might also work for Accenture while doing his murdering as a hobby.

[ Formula 1 drivers are the dullest stars that have ever bothered reality-television ]

Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+) begins with our hero, played by the great Jake Gyllenhaal, introducing himself. “My name is Rusty Savage, and I am the prosecutor of this trial.” That’s the spirit, Jake Gyllenhaal: get your character’s weird name out of the way early on. He’d never get away with having a name like Rusty Savage in an Irish town or workplace. He’d have to change it or move or become a politician or the kind of local “character” who hangs around chip shops. It’s a legacy of the John Grisham novel from which this is adapted. It’s also, I can now see on IMDB, spelled Rusty Sabich, to which I say a disappointed “Aw”.

Presumed Innocent is another show about crime people criming crimefully, but it takes a very different approach from Criminal Minds, with handheld-camera angles, fluid dialogue and naturalistic acting. This approach works really well with what is a satisfyingly melodramatic story. Rusty finds himself investigating the murder of his former colleague, who is also, it turns out, his lover. Before the first episode is over he’s a suspect. It’s gripping. Eventually HR will have to be involved. If he worked for the A-Team they’d just knock him unconscious, name him Howling Mad Rusty and leave it at that.