So…Mindhunter just isn’t working for me. The pace is so ponderous and dragging, that even though I appreciate some of its stylishness, it just isn’t clicking.
But because I watched 5 episodes, Netflix suggests I watch something called “Manhunt-Unabomber”. That’s a terrible name for a show. It’s listed as being a product of the Discovery Channel. It isn’t even clear what this is. A documentary? A docu-drama? A dramatic series?
It turns out is is a dramatic series. Huh. And there’s an early scene where it’s very clear that this series cost a lot of money to make. Plus, this is not a show without some stars in it. Sam Worthington plays the lead, and he strikes the same weirdo chords as his counterpart in Mindhunters. (Apparently behaving as if you’re on the spectrum is a pre-req to be in the FBI’s Behavioral Unit.)
And the thing is…this thing is better than it has any right to be. Most of the time it’s terrific in fact. The casting of Kaczyinski (I wouldn’t dare spoil it) is inspired. Chris Noth is reliable and good. Mark Duplass is unrecognizable in his scenes, but great.
What I love about the series is how it keeps the narrative moving. Mostly. (There’s a late episode all about Ted and his background that’s good…but if you feel like it’s filler, I won’t argue.) It’s fascinating to watch how they tracked down the Unabomber/Unabomer with scant clues to work with. And the series gets all the big stuff right, at least the stuff I know about the case. The creative folks behind this are smart enough to know that this is compelling as shit, and they stay out of the way and let the story unspool itself. Amazingly, even though we all know how this ends, it’s still suspenseful and taut.
There are some annoying problems too, maybe the worst of which is the cliched wife and family conflict, where our hero FBI profiler can’t seem to make the wet blanket missus understand how important it is that he catch the serial bomber. Why can’t those mopes understand that him catching a killer is so much more important that having dinner with the family? Don’t they get it?
That stuff aside, this is really solid. It definitely scratches the itch that Mindhunter promises, and I think better in a lot of ways. (I reserve the right to change that opinion when I finally get to the end of that show, though.)
The final episode (the trial, or lead into it) is terrific, and a great conclusion to the series itself.
Also makes you worry that our current socio-political climate is going to create more Unabombers, or that the rash of mass-shootings is an expression of some of the things that drove Kaczynski.
I’m three episodes in, and I’m liking this a lot less than Mindhunter.
It rubs several cliches right into your face from the first minutes on, e.g. the reclusive amd reluctant super-detective that gets called back into action, the detective that goes too deep into case that it changes him profoundly, the detective who is so obsessed with a case that he and his wife become estranged, the detective who is so obsessed that he goes to a bombing scene at night while everyone else is enjoying beers, the detective who spreads all evidence/hints across the floor and mutters something along the lines of “C’mon, talk to me.” And in the 1997 timeline, they try to turn Kaczynski into an antagonist who feels like a mixture of Hannibal Lecter and the killer from Se7en who has it all figured out. And in the episode 3 interrogation, within 3 minutes, it feels like he points out 3-4 times that the evidence will get dropped if the search warrant doesn’t hold water. 3-4 times. Watching it made me angry because I was “Ok, I got it the first time!”
The main character is (at this point) is utterly bland, and Sam Worthington’s partially to blame. The main progonist in Mindhunter is annoyingly bland, too, but Holt MacCallany and the people they cast for the serial killers make up for it. In Manhunt, everyone but the protagonist, his partner and the lab guy seem to be assholes - the latter two not getting much to do or act on though.
It’s not terrible, but I could see someone else get a better show based on the actual events - probably also by sticking closer to them.
Yep, I started it but felt exactly the same, tired old tropes getting rolled out again. Also it really does not bare any resemblance to what really happened. Didn’t work for me.
Interesting. I felt the cliches in this series were every bit as egregious as the character cliches throughout Mindhunter…but at least this series had the good sense to move the plot along instead of creaking along at a glacial pace as if worrying out its second season.
And FWIW, after watching the show, I was interested enough to read the book from the FBI perspective on the case and found that a lot of what’s in the series – especially related to Kaczynski – is closer to real than I’d expected, certainly at least as much as with Mindhunter. And the real Jim Fitzgerald served as a story consultant on this. He’s mentioned that Worthington’s character is a composite of him and some of the other investigators, but that the series is about 80% accurate. The biggest deviation in his mind is that in real life, Fitz never got his sit-down with Kaczynski to try to convince him to not represent himself and take the guilty plea. He was slated to do so, but when he arrived at the prison, ol’ Ted canceled on him without explanation. The series uses Fitzgerald’s actual questions he’d prepared for that scene.
Yeah but there is also a lot of stuff that is not correct, it watches like a one man show which it never was. There was 4 or 5 people involved heavily.
I suppose it’s easy to take out the bits that fit how we each feel, sure there were some decent bits but for me there was more that was negative. It was like Sam Worthington all alone caught the Unabomber which is far from the truth in all aspects and why I did research in to it, that 20% missing or inaccurate is quite a bit that really mattered for me.
I watched this and baring a couple of little convenient shortcuts, I enjoyed it tremendously.
I had absolutely zero knowledge of what the unabomb case was about. It was a very intriguing and a very fascinating tale of why intelligence, when you have it at your disposal, is devastating if used in nefarious ways. I appreciated also how the bland looking protagonist was often portrayed as quite an asshole. I didn’t get out of it thinking he had caught him single-handedly, quite the contrary — although I recall there was an episode in the middle that went quite in that direction. I absolutely loved Chris Noth’s brief eruption in the 7th episode.
Anyway to sum it up it was a very stimulating watch, one that echoes with lots of concerns I didn’t expect to be raised when I started watching. It also was the occasion to learn about the existence of Jacques Ellul, who seems to be as known in the US as he was ignored in his home country.
Thank you for the lovely recommandation, @triggercut!
