Revisiting Mindhunter, the Best Buddy Cop Show of the 2010s

For fans of the Netflix drama Mindhunter, which ran from 2017 to 2019, closure did not come easy. With two seasons in the books and what seemed like an obvious springboard into at least one more season, the investigative thriller lingered with its fate unknown for years. It wasn't until early 2023 that executive producer David Fincher confirmed that there would be no more. "I’m very proud of the first two seasons," he told a French publication. "But it’s a very expensive show, and in the eyes of Netflix, we didn’t attract enough of an audience to justify such an investment."

The Pandora's box of questions that raises, in terms of Netflix's war chest, the profitability of the streamer’s projects, and the overall grim prospects of the streaming model, will have to wait for another day. For the moment, Fincher's expected yet still disappointing confirmation merely served as inspiration: It was time for a Mindhunter rewatch.

In 2017, when Mindhunter premiered, we were still in the throes of the true-crime craze (it's a craze that hasn't exactly gone away, but look no further than Only Murders in the Building to find a show that has outgrown the true-crime podcast that was once at its center). Mindhunter promised a show that would reveal the origins of the FBI's behavioral science unit, which would revolutionize the way this country understood and ultimately sought to apprehend serial killers. Fincher had tackled one of the most notorious serial killers of them all with his 2007 film Zodiac, and Mindhunter promised the same kind of meticulous, riveting investigation into any number of both real and fictional killers.

It's not that Mindhunter ever denied that kind of a show to its viewers. This wasn't a bait and switch. But for as much as Fincher — who directed the first two episodes of the series and was more or less the showrunner — would tantalize us with non-sequitur cold opens featuring an expressionless, mustachioed home-security employee in Wichita, Kansas, his show was playing the long game. More than anything else, the first four episodes of Season 1 were about the peculiar and ultimately rewarding partnership of Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff). And no matter how much the BTK Killer and the Son of Sam and Ed Kemper loomed threateningly over these early episodes, Mindhunter was never more effective than when it was building the partnership between these two very different FBI agents.

It's impossible not to compare Ford and Tench with The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully in these early episodes, with Ford the true believer and Tench the hectoring skeptic. And it's true that Ford spends a good deal of these first four episodes preaching his ideas about serial ("sequence") killers and how there might be a way to study their madness for patterns. It's also true that Tench is assigned to Ford to rein him in. But Fincher and the Mindhunter writers complicate that almost right away. For one thing, Tench is mostly onboard with Ford's theories, or at least knows enough to defer to Ford's mind. McCallany plays this side of Tench so well. There's a huge part of him that wants to be so annoyed with Ford — whose youth and boyish good looks play into this, but we'll get to that in a second — that wants Ford to shut up and go on their little teaching assignments and stop making waves. But, often to his great annoyance, he knows that Ford is right about this stuff. Tench knows that he's faced with a choice to be obstinate in the face of advanced, analytical approaches to his job, and he chooses to be open to change.

Fincher and the Mindhunter team cast these two roles incredibly well. Jonathan Groff is one of the prettiest human beings of any gender to ever exist, while Holt McCallany looks like a gym teacher. They're perfect together. In the pilot episode's first moments, Groff's softness stands out among the more gruff cops. He's noticeably boyish among his FBI colleagues at Quantico. This quality follows Ford out of the office too. His flirty, sexy relationship with Debbie (Hannah Gross), as doomed as it is, sees Ford put himself in the submissive role. That role is mirrored when he goes to visit serial killers like Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton) in prison. Ford knowingly lays himself out for Kemper in order to earn his trust and get him to open up. Watching Groff operate in these scenes, there's no other word for what Ford is doing here but flirting.

Tench, for his part, is repulsed by Ford's behavior with Kemper. Here's where the tension between these two characters flourishes. These murderers disgust Tench, and Ford's willingness to play into their sympathies in order to extract valuable information from them is also disgusting. It's a dynamic that's clarified even further when Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) joins the team and plays the middle ground between them, sharing neither Tench's moral hangups about their work nor Ford's more naive leanings. They make an incredible team.

Everything Mindhunter reveals about Tench makes him less and less of a cardboard authority figure for Ford. He confesses that his adopted son won't speak or show affection to him. After Tench and Ford are sideswiped at an intersection, Tench is visibly upset, not because of the near-catastrophe that almost befell him but because he failed to keep Ford, his passenger, safe. There's a sweet center to Bill Tench, and I'm reminded how fiercely that moment drew me to him.

That promise of a series-length version of Zodiac lingers in the heads of Mindhunter's audience for a little while. Those interrogations with the serial killers felt indebted to similar scenes in Zodiac, plus all that '70s-style wood paneling in the decor. But the Fincher movie these first four episodes most remind me of is Seven, a movie with its own set of mismatched cops who clash over the different ways they look at the world and approach their jobs. Ford is the Sommerset of this duo, willing to wade into the mind of the killer, adamant that his colleagues not just brush off the killings as the work of a garden-variety psycho. Despite their differences in demeanor, Tench is a less-twitchy version of Brad Pitt's Mills, who is willing to let his partner teach him some things, and whose family makes him vulnerable.

It's exciting to wade back into Mindhunter: its exquisite moodiness; the way Fincher can turn behavioral-science research into a buddy-cop narrative; the way it's always just a little bit funnier than it needs to be. The serial killers will eventually move in closer from the margins, and it'll be frustrating knowing the show was cut short before Tench and Ford could deal with BTK or some of the other cases that were teased. But it's fun to be in Fincher's hands again, and it's especially fun to be watching the Bill Tench and Holden Ford Are Friends Hour again.

Up next: Season 1 rolls on with "Episode 5," "Episode 6," "Episode 7," and "Episode 8." Tench and Ford help the local police solve the murder of a young Pennsylvania woman, while their personal lives begin to feel the strain of their work.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.