David Fincher Reflects on His MINDHUNTER Series and Why Netflix Canceled It
Mindhunter was one of those all-around amazing shows that got canceled before its full story was able to be told. I’m still upset that Netflix canceled it and that we won’t get to see how the story was going to play out. During a recent interview with Premiere magazine, per FincherAnalyst, creator David Fincher reflected on the show and why Netflix cancelled it, saying:
"Maybe House of Cards wasn't a huge risk, but Mindhunter was. A procedural on behavioral sciences that would be neither X-Files, nor CSI, nor Criminal Minds, but would function as the portrait of a guy who loses his virginity in the world of psychosexual sadists? We couldn't complete the trajectory, but it was a gamble. An expensive series, too. Very expensive. We went as far as we could until someone finally said to us, 'It makes no sense to produce this series like this, unless you can reduce the budget, or make it more pop, so that more people will watch it.'
“We did not want to change our approach so, respectfully, they told us that they were drawing a line under it. That's it: I always take a slight step aside from what is expected of me. Otherwise, I'm not interested. At a test screening of Seven, in the second of silence just before the lights came back on, while everyone was gasping for air, I caught the producer cursing at me, 'This guy has taken a great thriller and made it into a foreign film!'"
Combining true crime and fiction, the series is based on the 1995 book “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit,” written by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The series is set in the 70s and it follows FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) as they set up a unit that studies convicted serial killers as a way to try and determine what, if anything, makes one.
Over the course of the first two seasons of the show, the team examined killers such as Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton), Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson), Wayne Williams (Christopher Livingston), and Charles Manson (Damon Herriman).
In the process, the series was also building up the story of BTK, the conclusion of which we’ll never get to see. As for what Season 3 might have entailed, series director Andrew Dominik Explained: "What they were going to do with Season 3 was they were going to go [to] Hollywood. So one of them was going to be hooking up with Jonathan Demme and the other one was going to be hooking up with Michael Mann. And it was all going to be about profiling making it into the sort of zeitgeist, the public consciousness. It would've been... That was the season everyone was really waiting for to do, with when they sort of get out of the basement and start."
A couple of years ago, Fincher said that, "At some point, I'd love to revisit it. The hope was to get all the way up to the late '90s, early 2000s, hopefully, get all the way up to people knocking on the door at Dennis Rader's house."
But, the show is dead. When previously talking about the reason it wouldn’t continue, he explained that it was a very expensive show, and that he’s not sure “if it makes sense to continue.” He said, “It was an expensive show. It had a very passionate audience, but we never got the numbers that justified the cost.”
It was also explained that the series was “exhausting” for Fincher. The filmmaker previously explained, “it’s a 90-hour work week. It absorbs everything in your life. When I got done, I was pretty exhausted, and I said, 'I don’t know if I have it in me right now to break season three.'”
Fincher said, “I certainly needed some time away. We had all hands on deck to finish [season two] and we didn’t have a ton of scripts and a ton of outlines and a bible standing by for season three. I’ll admit I was a little bit like ‘I don’t know that I’m ready to spend another two years in the crawl space.'”