This would have been great. Oh well…
Mindhunter, we hardly knew ye.
Netflix isn’t having the greatest of weeks, what with losing 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, forecasting another drop of two million viewers in the next quarter, and teasing an ad-heavy version of the platform.
It’s unlikely to improve drastically on the PR front when you read about what could have been for one of the most beloved shows to emerge during the streaming giant’s lifespan.
Having gone into a state of abrupt limbo at the start of 2020, serial killer drama Mindhunter remains one of the most tantalising ‘will they, won’t they?’ TV production stories of the modern age.
Show producer David Fincher has moved on to different projects, while the principal cast no longer have contracts tying them to the series. This is despite initial plans for the show to run for at least five seasons.
Mindhunter fever – not actually a medical condition – has grown so intense that any time Netflix teases a major announcement, the replies on social media are inevitably centred on the dormant show. Indeed, when promising “something special is coming tomorrow from David Fincher”, filmmaker Asif Kapadia – who worked on season one of Mindhunter – called on fans to make enough noise to secure a third season.
As for that third season? It sounded like it would have been pretty damn excellent.
Speaking to Collider, director Andrew Dominik – the man behind Netflix’s upcoming for-adults-only Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde – said that main characters Holden Ford and Bill Tench were going to rub shoulders with the stars.
It appears the show was set to explore the making of classic serial killer films like Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs, to name but two.
“What they were going to do with Season 3 was they were going to go [to] Hollywood,” said Dominik.
“So one of them was going to be hooking up with Jonathan Demme [the director of The Silence of the Lambs] and the other one was going to be hooking up with Michael Mann [Manhunter].
“And it was all going to be about profiling making it into the sort of zeitgeist, the public consciousness. It would’ve been… That was the season everyone was really waiting for them to do, with when they sort of get out of the basement and start.”
Dominik, who worked on season two of Mindhunter, said that he jumped at the chance to be involved with the show.
“I probably got involved in it for the same reason that you liked it, right,” he told Collider.
“I really loved it. And I knew David and I called him up, and he was like, ‘Do you want to do the Manson episode?’ … I mean, how can you say no to the Charles Manson episode? … I got to work on that basically because I knew David, and it was a really good experience. It was very kind of collegial.”
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