Netflix is Officially About to Lose its Best Mindhunter Replacement This Month

For two seasons, Mindhunter was one of the best psychological crime thrillers on Netflix. The series was based on the 1995 true-crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, and it told the story of the formation of the Behavioral Science Unit in the FBI. For fans of shows like Criminal Minds, this series showed how the real-life version of the BSU was created, and the serial killers the agents interviewed to build their profiling database. To make it even better, David Fincher was the executive producer and directed several episodes.

Since Mindhunter was cancelled, fans looked for replacements and found one in an older series that arrived on Netflix called Aquarius. This show actually premiered on NBC two years before Mindhunter hit Netflix and is a period crime drama that uses real-life people and events, but incorporates them into fictional stories. While fans have had a chance to see it on Netflix, Aquarius leaves the streaming service on June 16th.

Why Aquarius Is Perfect for Mindhunter Fans

There are still a few weeks left to watch Aquarius on Netflix before it leaves the service on June 16th. This is great for any Mindhunter fans who haven’t had a chance to watch this crime drama series yet. David Duchovny stars in the show as LAPD Detective Sam Hodiak, a man investigating the rise of Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) and the Manson family in 1967. The series then explores the counterculture that helped lead to social upheaval in the 1960s and the rise of crime in that era.

What makes this so similar to Mindhunter is that both series take the real-life criminals and stories from the past and add them into stories that are often fictionalized. In Mindhunter, the stories are mostly real and pulled from the book about the BSU’s creation. However, many of the events are dramatized and are not exactly what happened in real life. Aquarius takes that even further and creates completely fictional stories, but set in a world where real-life criminals and famous figures coexist.

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Duchovny was the most recognizable face in the Aquarius cast, but there was a solid group of actors who helped carry the story. The most notable was Madisen Beaty, who played Manson family member Patricia Krenwinkel (called Patty in the series). Beaty played the exact same role a few years later in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was another fictional story involving the Manson family. The entire idea with Aquarius was to create historical fiction, where it showed what 1967 Los Angeles was really like, but in a fictionalized story.

Aquarius was also known for its great music soundtrack, and each episode was actually titled after a song from the era. The second season notably had every episode named after a song from The Beatles’ White Album, which tied into Charles Manson’s obsession with their music. While the series was envisioned to run for six seasons, it was, like Mindhunter, cancelled after only two. Fans have a few weeks before Aquarius leaves Netflix to see what the fuss was all about.

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