Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior

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We now have 2 episodes of the Criminal Minds spin-off under our belts.  How are you feeling about this show?  I think that they have some re-tooling to do if they want this show to be successful.  The characters are just not likeable, in my opinion.  Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Sam Cooper, the Unit Chief is just dreadful.  Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Mandy Patinkin (Gideon), Joe Mantegna (Rossi), and Thomas Gibson who plays the current Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner.  The stuttered delivery of all of Forest’s lines really, really bugs me.  I really dislike his character too.  I don’t know why either.  He’s annoying.  As long as they keep Whitaker in the cast, I don’t see how this show ever gets up off the ground.  Adding insult to injury—the team has absolutely no chemistry.  Will that change over time?  Beats me.

The whole point of this spin-off is that it’s not a typical BAU but rather a ‘red cell’ which reports directly to the FBI director.  So here’s the issue I have with that in the last 2 episodes:  shouldn’t a red cell that is special and operating at a higher level be engaged in a higher level investigations?  Perhaps focused on national security threats even?  Why are they chasing pedophiles and serial killers as if they were an ordinary BAU?  There has been nothing special about either case they’ve taken that raises this unit above the BAU in DC or NY.  I do find it interesting that Suspect Behavior is also leveraging Garcia.  That seems a little screwy to me.  The original BAU team keeps her quite busy.  And Garcia is actually a team member for the DC BAU.  It really makes no sense to have her supporting this red cell.  Frankly, they should have their own Garcia.  Why not pull her boyfriend in to support this new team?  I get why they want a crossover character.  I just think that using Garcia this way is implausible.  What would have been better would have been to pull Gideon into lead this team, I think.  How cool would that have been?

I will give this show a few more episodes to see if they can work the kinks out and give us something worth watching.  After the first 2 episodes, though, I’m not holding out much hope that this will stay on my rotation.  That said, if you’ve missed the first 2 episodes, you can catch them online here. 

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