Criminal Minds says goodbye after 15 years: Why the CBS police procedural was a guilty pleasure

Slate

The CBS crime series that premiered in September 2005 exits tonight after 15 seasons and 324 episodes. Criminal Minds fan Rachelle Hampton explains why the show endured as a guilty pleasure: "The good guys catch the bad guys, and sometimes Shemar Moore is shirtless. That’s the basic premise of CBS’s procedural drama Criminal Minds, which will air its final episode on Wednesday after 15 seasons," she says. "For the past decade and a half, the show has followed a revolving cast of FBI agents as they track down serial killers for the fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit. Buzzier shows like Mindhunter and True Detective and docuseries like Conversations with a Killer or The Keepers have since provided fresher serial killer content, but when Criminal Minds aired in 2005, its concept—a slight remix on the tried-and-true villain of week formula—was relatively unique. Despite it now being part of a rather crowded field, the show has been one of my consistent guilty pleasures over the past 10 years—one whose appeal I have long struggled to explain to others. I started watching Criminal Minds in junior high, before I fully understood the ramifications of cop procedural shows and their tendency to function as propaganda that glosses over the discrimination and brutality that’s baked into law enforcement. And yet even as I grew more familiar with the brokenness of our criminal justice system and the abhorrent history of the FBI, I still found myself turning to Criminal Minds in quiet moments when I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything else. Why do I like this objectively not-great show? The most compelling reason is that, by virtue of focusing on serial killers—one of the whitest subsets of criminals, at least in the public imagination—Criminal Minds made it pretty easy to ignore the racial dynamics that make early episodes of Law & Order so cringey. A less compelling (though probably more honest) reason is that Criminal Minds at its very best is just my kind of formulaic fun, despite the morbidity baked into its premise. When the show attempted season-long arcs or social commentary was when I was most likely to tune out. But episodic case-of-the-week plots—or better yet, the one-two punch of a two-episode arc—hit the perfect sweet spot." ALSO: Matthew Gray Gubler, one of Criminal Minds' last original cast members, says the series finale plants roots for it to "re-hatch" later.