Why You Should Watch Criminal Minds

If this isn’t a eery twist on Wag the Dog, 1997 absent Robert DeNiro, Anne Heche and Woody Harrelson. This new show premiered with a horrendous highly technical inside view of the internet predator and exploiter of children. A child is locked in a windowless room with a GI Joe and a toilet with a video cam on him which the hostage taker is selling on the internet. Apparently the pervert is tired of the kid, so he decides to auction the kid off to the highest bidder. So enters the crack unit of the FBI to rescue the kid who they have known about for some time, but can’t find. There is a returning from medical leave profiler who is supposed to be taking it easy and a doctor of psychology and investigators and profiler and they all are on the screen to save the kid. I don’t know if it was just insidious marketing or inspired by Barry Levinson himself, but on premiere night a Washington Times employee was busted for posing as a thirteen year girl. Granted Hollywood inspired catch a predator shows can be seen on many of the networks. The news magazine shows may be educational, but is this a weekly entertainment series or what?

Here we are getting ready for a new season of great new shows on TV and again the news features override the plots. Unless of course you are a home viewing pervert that loves the cyber language of your trade. Criminal Minds gave us all more information about remote servers, SQL, and finding zip codes than the average person would even think to ask.

Also, it gave us all a survey course in How to Classify Child Molester. Apparently, there are two classifications. And in keeping with this theme wouldn’t you know it the principal of the local elementary school is a Class 1 child pornographer. In order to extract his office computer password they simply have to write his handle name for the chat rooms and read it backwards. He is a family man and pleads for his career and life. The investigators of this special unit of the FBI, who deal with this stuff every day lay some disgust on him which you would think if they are pros would recognize that with these pervs is lost on, but anyway they preach a bit.

Criminal Minds even has Nancy Drew and her side kick Cindy Code Cracker. Somewhere in the bowels of the FBI or the CIA in Quantico Virginia two young ladies are going through the register of credit card bills used to pay for web sites and other internet uses and locate keys to addresses and names of a series of leads. The lead does not go to the hostage taker of the kid, but to another kid who is held up in his abandoned house selling his own child pornography to make a living because his rotten pervert dad who got him started in the business has split the scene.

The kid making a living off his own horrendous experiences is the key to finding the school principal who is in turn the key to finding the hostage taker of the kid up for auction. The principal says he bought the kid for $8,000 to save him. The crack unit of the FBI says, yeah sure. And just when it looks like the case is going to come to a quick close the MEDIA which looks surprisingly like Nancy Grace come on the air and blows the investigation. The hostage taker pervert is watching TV, what else does a pervert do all day with a kid locked up in a room, but watch CNN. Of course, he is a technical wiz and immediately takes down on the cyber connections and we are then whisked onto the final conclusion.

This plot and interplay is way too technical and it is hard to find much entertaining in the tedious crafted story line. It isn’t the CSI series. It isn’t Law & Order. It isn’t Cops. It is a premier show with stereotyped characters mistaking sickness for entertainment. I have no idea where this show is going, but I am looking for entertainment on TV something that is enjoyable and light. This is personal choice, but I like the foibles of The Office, My Name is Earl and Boston Legal. Good acting, good story lines and entertainment. If I wanted to watch a story about the most base element of our society I would probably watch a news documentary.