The Lesson Is Murder

Ah yes, another show has arrived in order to cash in on the insatiable appetite of the general population for some sort of 'Murder/Death/Kill' show. And yet again, it's a poorly formulated, poorly done, poorly executed show.

It's alleged to be a documentary style series, yet it feels heavily scripted with people who aren't very adept and scripts/lines.

There's nonsense about the criminal- *childhood issues *seemed completely normal *everyone was stunned the criminal is criminal!

Yet there's so much that needs a spotlight, and mysteriously this supposed teacher and inferred OVERqualified former fed never even considered asking pretty rudimentary questions of the people associated with the criminal/victim or her students.

When these poorly done shows start appearing, it usually reflects the end of a trend- so I'm guessing our appetite for this genre is approaching 15:00 on the timer.

Just back away slowly and spend your hour outdoors touching grass.

For those of you who are interested in the fast-paced, Criminal Minds, Psycho-pass, Mindhunter stuff, this is not for you.

As a social worker, I need to know and understand the motivations of my clients that I might be able to work through the sessions and case interventions.

A lot of such work isn't glitz and glamour. And I wouldn't expect a criminologist's work to be anything different, because we're all working with a segment of the population that presents with pathological tendencies toward certain behaviours. To know a person is through the available material on them, as well the processes through which information is gathered to build a profile.

It's not all about diagnoses - because a diagnosis is not fixed and usually can shift. It's after all a diagnostic tool to describe a symptoms which are currently presenting, and this show's - IMO - not supposed to be a show about prescribed approaches.

Profiling is inexact and the thing the show does is show how challenging it is to not even close to halfway understanding how psychopathy operates in different types of people because of the complexities of particular human experience in-situ.

It's pretty informative, which I found was quite decent in this documentary. Could it be improved with more elaboration on concepts and assumptions? Perhaps - but that might cause viewers to think they can replicate that without the proper training. So there's tension between viewer expectation and the professional's responsibility.

Lastly, if you watch it with pre-conceived notions about what it would be like, you probably have been captured by the pizzazz of mainstream fodder like the overly dramatised crime shows of the last 2 decades, and may be on the way to losing a sense of realism.

Some of the most profound quotes were stuff like "It just really caught me off guard...although there was that one time when he tried to drive a car into his girlfriends parents house" Or maybe "Hands up everyone here who has stress in their lives ? (everyone raises hands) "And yet none of us killed anyone right ?" Wow. A series dedicated to the mastery of the blatantly obvious. Clearly designed for the mainly illiterate American market, a place where 20% of Americans can't locate the US on a world map, and 12% think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Another triumph for total mediocrapy.

So this would basically caption the first episode. When a group of people comes together and tries to rationalize a serial killer.

I was hoping to learn more about the killer and really get an interesting deepdive into his psych profile. But it turned out to be a very superficial, one sided, slow minded, overproduced faeces of a show.

I've seen my share of badly produced killer/death shows. But atleast there usually was some actual interesting information in there.

Most of the time during the episode it was the FBI teacher asking her students if they had ever experienced stress/trauma (yes).

But then why didn't they kill any people? Yet still not asking THAT question about the serial killer himself.

So there it is, enjoy the ride.

The discussions among the group are nothing more than a boring exchange of opinions. There's no significant mention of mental illness or any psychiatric pathophysiology. They overlook the obvious motivator - a need to feel control and/or power because the rest of his life now feels beyond his control. Just as rape is about control and power, and cutting is about feeling something other than pain and lack of control, this type of killing is rarely about money or mercy. Very disappointing dialogue. Didn't actually expect anything on par with Criminal Minds, but this seemed completely uninspired.