Killer Instinct

Pretty good show. The main guy is a little melodramatic but no worse and a little better than some.

I actually liked this! I watch a lot of true crime stuff. And contrary to what a previous review said, after watching only one episode, in the episode Stranglehold the police blatantly say they would not have solved the crime without the profiler's help on the case.

I do understand why "profilers" love to do shows like these- it helps perpetuate their cushy job and healthy paychecks rolling in. Much like a psychic, they point out the painfully obvious, then make broad sweeping predictions and hedge their bets against the inevitable inaccuracy. No better than any decent detective, but they cost taxpayers a bundle extra.Suffer through the first episode if you must. You'll learn that simple, straight-forward basic police work and common sense found the murderer. Correlating lists, doing the legwork. The profiler shoveled a lot of manure, and made himself look busy. Profiling has been the subject of more than one university study. Most conclude that profilers offer no better results than regular cops who plug a few simple variables into a chart. The rest of the 'nuanced' analysis is just guesswork. Every murderer has some patterns. However, just like the rest of us, they have loads of contradictions and many features of their lives are far from expected defying any ration analysis or prediction. Remember the BTK killer a while back? The FBI had him pegged as an antisocial loner, not connected to anyone, moved alot, changed jobs alot, etc. OOOOPS. Married, kids, stable job, and of course, a pillar of his church.
Profiling is even less likely to correctly identify a suspect when killers are female, or children as there is very little in the data pool.

Fairly dry walkthroughs of past cases of this FBI profiler, profiling and catching serial killers. The interest so far comes from the creep-out factor of the crimes and the reality of an often-fictionalized forensic role. Would probably appeal to the America's Most Wanted audience and some watchers of crime dramas. There are very few visuals that matter, so it works as background audio while doing something else. There's nothing very gory so far, but some of the crime scene photos or snippets of reenactment may be hard to see.Since they're covering mostly the profiler's role, which is just one part of what I'm sure is a huge effort, I'd be interested in a further explication of the behavioral analysis process, its background, successes, and failures, and what parts of the analysis are the real value-add for detectives, as well as what the fictional versions get wrong.