Netflix's Hit 'Hannibal Meets Criminal Minds' Series Is One Of Its Best Psychological Thrillers

By Sofia Martinez · Culture & Entertainment Editor

May 5, 2026 · 5 min read

Cathal Gunning

Published May 5, 2026, 7:36 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While both Criminal Minds and Hannibal_ might seem irreplaceable, one Netflix show is a perfect substitute for both cult hits, thanks to its fascination with the inner workings of monstrous murderers. Since the birth of psychoanalysis, people have been fascinated with what makes murderers tick, and movies and TV have been more than happy to delve into the minds of killers. As early as the end of the 1960s, Psycho director Alfred Hitchcock plonked a psychologist in front of viewers to explain the twisted psychology behind the movie’s villain.

Both movies and psychology itself have come a long way since then, but the public’s enduring fascination with killers remains a cultural constant. This has given rise to some genuine masterpieces of horror and thriller film making, as well as not a few exploitative, tasteless, poorly researched, or misleading movies and shows. Within this genre, producer Bryan Fuller’s three-season masterpiece Hannibal is one of the most widely acclaimed shows that engages with the topic of criminal psychology. Ingeniously, the show’s villain is a psychologist, too, which puts them on equal footing with their profiler and threatens the genre's usual power balance.

Hannibal follows Hugh Dancy’s obsessive criminal profiler Will Graham as he becomes locked in a macabre battle of wits with the eponymous serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Initially a “Case of the week” procedural series, Hannibal shifted from police procedural like the earlier_ Criminal Minds_ into something more serialized and ambitious in season 2. For viewers who liked the depth and complexity of Hannibal but enjoyed the “Case of the week” approach favored by Criminal Minds, Netflix’s Mindhunter is a perfect blend of both styles in one acclaimed project.

Mindhunter's Story Focuses On The FBI's Real-Life Behavioral Science Unit

_ Mindhunter still

Alongside You and The Hunting Wives_, Mindhunter is one of Netflix’s most acclaimed psychological thriller shows. Loosely adapted from the non-fiction book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, Mindhunter sees executive producer David Fincher take the same approach to this source material that he took to 2010’s iconic drama_ The Social Network_. That movie was technically adapted from Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, but took plenty of creative liberties in retelling the dramatic rise and fall of Facebook’s founders.

Similarly, although Mindhunter features plenty of meticulous recreations of real-life interviews with actual notorious serial killers, the show still took dramatic license with its invented heroes. Holt McCallany’s beleaguered veteran Bill Tench and Jonathan Groff’s comparatively idealistic rookie Holden Ford are tasked with setting up the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit as the series begins. Set in the late 1970s, the show sees the pair navigate the then-emerging science of criminal profiling with the help of Anna Torv’s psychologist, a closeted lesbian named Wendy Carr.

Tensions inevitably arise between Tench and Ford as the pair have very different ideas about law enforcement and criminal justice, but it is Carr who truly challenges Ford’s entire approach to criminal profiling as a concept. That said, as much as Mindhunter’s story focuses on the interplay between these characters, it is the show’s utilization of real-life serial killer interviews that were recorded by the FBI during this era that makes the series uniquely chilling. While Tench, Ford, and Carr are composite characters based on real-life people, the serial killers the agents speak to are very real.

Mindhunter's Serial Killer Interviews Are Terrifyingly Real

_ Image courtesy of Everett Collection

In a fascinating creative choice that pays off dividends throughout the series, Mindhunter_’s heroes are seen interviewing various infamous serial killers in an attempt to formulate a theory of how violent murderers come into being. Season 1 sees Hench and Ford speak to Edmund Kemper, Richard Speck, Dennis Reader, and Montie Russell in a string of deeply creepy, sometimes tragic interviews. Meanwhile, season 2 introduces the Son of Sam, William Pierce Jr. and, eventually, inevitably, one of the most infamous murderers of the 20th century in the form of cult leader Charles Manson.

What makes these interview sequences so compelling is the fact that they are largely based on the BSU’s real-life recordings. While trashier true-crime dramatizations like the execrable Monster: The Ed Gein Story fabricate huge swathes of their stories, Mindhunter sticks disarmingly close to the facts of the cases that its agents investigate. Watching the real-life interview footage alongside the show’s versions of these sessions is a shocking experience, and the verisimilitude lends credence to the rest of the show’s story.

Mindhunter Refreshes The Familiar Stories Of Hannibal & Criminal Minds

_ Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany in Mindhunter

By the time Mindhunter_ arrived in 2017, viewers could have been forgiven for wondering whether another show about criminal profilers was really a good idea. By this stage, Criminal Minds had already been on the air for 12 years and as many seasons, and had even spawned not one, but two spinoffs in the form of_ Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders_. Meanwhile, not only had Mindhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon all brought Hannibal Lecter to life onscreen, but all three seasons of Hannibal had then recently aired between 2015 and 2017.

It seemed vanishingly unlikely that another psychological thriller show from Netflix would be able to find a genuinely original take on the theme of criminal profilers, especially when these existing shows and movies already needed to come up with ways to make the subject feel fresh after the Oscar-winning success of The Silence of the Lambs. In an ingenious move, Mindhunter didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but instead did the opposite by taking viewers back to the early, emerging days of thsi controversial science. Thus, the show’s simplicity was its unlikely raison d’être.

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By Cathal Gunning

By bringing viewers back to the early days of the BSU’s existence, Mindhunter_ didn’t take any knowledge of criminal profiling for granted. Where earlier shows and movies ran through the possible motives for most murderers at lightning speed, Fincher’s show made these old tropes feel new by showing Hench and Ford encountering them for the first time. By harkening back to an era long before both Criminal Minds and Hannibal’s stories take place, Mindhunter made the familiar feel new again and gave an old story an uncanny, unsettling update as a result.