This Netflix Series Was Planning for More Seasons in a Great Way, So Why Did It Get Cancelled?

If there is one thing that people love to watch, it’s stories about death. Whether it’s a detective series about jaw-dropping crime sprees or a true crime docuseries that details a brutal slaying at the hands of a cold-blooded killer, audiences can’t get enough of macabre mysteries. So it made perfect sense for Netflix to combine the two when the streaming service added Mindhunter to its library of original series. Created by Joe Penhall, the show followed the early days of criminal profiling in the 1970s inside the FBI. Starring Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv, Mindhunter immediately found a solid base of diehard fans. However, following the show’s second season in 2019, executive producer David Fincher and Netflix began to have reservations regarding the psychological thriller. After a lengthy hiatus with endless rumors, Mindhunter was officially cancelled in early 2023.

While the cancellation wasn’t exactly a surprise for even the most loyal of fans, it was still disappointing to see such a highly-rated show end on an incomplete note. In fact, some fans still can’t get over it. To add insult to injury, Mindhunter was originally planned to have five seasons, following the trio of lead characters throughout the development of the criminal profiling program. But as Fincher explained, the show had faced a number of challenges throughout its production history.

“We had done the first season of Mindhunter without a showrunner, with me pinch-hitting on a week-by-week basis,” Fincher said. After co-showrunning with Courtenay Miles for Season Two, Fincher already saw the writing on the wall. “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.’”

Paying Attention to Details, But Not the Budget

Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mindhunter follows FBI agents Holden Ford (Groff) and Bill Tench (McCallany) alongside psychologist Wendy Carr (Torv) as they pioneer the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. At the center of their mission, the team hopes to develop an effective system to profile the inner-workings of the mind of killers in an effort to catch killers on the prowl. To achieve that, the team travels to prisons across the country to interview infamous killers such as Richard Speck (Jack Erdie), Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson), and Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton). But as Ford, Tench, and Carr spend countless hours inside the minds of killers, they each begin to lose track of what’s most important in their personal lives.

Like any David Fincher project, just playing pretend is nowhere good enough for his meticulous artistic vision. In order to properly depict the look and feel of the ’70s and 80s’, the show included period-accurate sets, costumes, and vehicles, which only contributed to the show’s high production costs. With a reported budget of around $10 million per episode, Mindhunter became a hefty investment for Netflix. According to Fincher, the series simply became too expensive to justify another season, especially as viewership numbers left a lot to be desired. At the end of the day, a small core of diehard Mindhunter fans wasn’t enough to save the show. As a result, one of the show’s most intriguing and mysterious plotlines was left out in the cold.

Following a Lead

If you’re a person who has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of serial killers, then you likely knew all about the BTK killer, or Dennis Rader, well before Mindhunter hit Netflix. In June 2005, Rader pleaded guilty to killing 10 people between 1974 and 1991, though he has been suspected of possibly killing even more. In the second episode of Season One, Mindhunter quickly introduced the ADT Serviceman (Sonny Valicenti), or Rader, with an uneventful yet creepy short scene involving an empty roll of electrical tape. While the character was never given the primary focus of an entire episode, the ADT Serviceman appeared in a majority of the 19 episodes in brief glimpses. These glimpses ranged from seemingly mundane tasks to bone-chilling acts that made it clear how unhinged this person really was.

By Mindhunter’s final episode, we see the ADT Serviceman in a motel room surrounded by “trophies” he had taken from his victims and pictures of their murders. This was similar to the ending of Batman Begins where viewers are given a tease of what they could expect in the future. While Rader wouldn’t be caught for another 20 years, his presence on Mindhunter would have likely increased and provided an excellent compliment to Ford’s overall thesis that serial killers have an insatiable desire to be seen and ultimately … be caught. After essentially getting away with his heinous crimes, the real-life Dennis Rader couldn’t resist the spotlight and reengaged with police before being brought to justice. This development could have made for an interesting storyline had the show opted to venture that far into the future. Unfortunately, with the series cancelled, that was never meant to be.

You can stream Mindhunter on Netflix.