Criminal Minds

Aw, I like the gifs! We gotta find some good ones of Emily and whatnot, too. Good to see these parts of the forum getting filled out a little more.

So, "Criminal Minds". To answer the questions:

Favorite character: Reid. Shocking choice, I know -what can I say, I like the nerdy guys. Emily is a favorite, too-again, I relate to her nerdiness, and I like the mystery surrounding her and her life. But I love everybody on the team, even the characters that are long gone or were only there for the briefest of times (Ashley and Jordan). They're all so fascinating and fun to watch.

Favorite pairing: Reid/JJ. I've no problem with Will at all, he's cool and I like him and JJ together, too. But if the show ever were to romantically pair off any of the team members, for whatever reason, Reid and JJ would be my personal pick. He seemed to have something of a crush on her when the show first started, and in some ways I feel there's still a little attraction there, they're the only ones on the team who actually went on anything resembling a date (well, there's also Rossi's romance with Strauss-if Strauss counts as a proper team member), and I dunno, they just seem to have an interesting chemistry that I like and that I could see turning romantic.

Other particular favorite pairings would be either Morgan/Prentiss or Morgan/Garcia, and I like Morgan/Reid as well. But I'm open to pretty much any pairing-I kinda like it when someone puts two characters together I wouldn't expect and makes it work.

What got me into the show? A friend of mine. When I moved back home to Iowa in 2010, I was staying with said friend, and she loves this show, and so thanks to her I wound up watching the season five finale with her when it originally aired. That was the first I'd ever even heard of the series, and it intrigued me right away. It took a few more years for me to properly start checking out the series (various long story reasons as to why) but I'd seen it off and on in those few years and always had shown some interest. Then last year that friend and I were watching season 2 on DVD at her place and when I saw "Sex, Birth, Death", finally it all clicked and voila! The rest is history . Thank goodness for the ION and A&E channels and their incessant marathons of the show-made it that much easier to get all caught up.

The "why people do bad things" part of that is what's always interested me, too. I watch a lot of true crime shows, but I've never really been one to watch crime dramas. But "Criminal Minds" hits on the aspect of studying crimes that I find most interesting-the why of it all, getting into the psychology and mentality of people who do things like this, learning their backstories-and that's a part of what drew me to the show. I like how they can manage to make us sympathize with the victims AND the unsubs all at the same time. There's the occasional unsub it's hard to feel any sympathy for, of course (child abusers/killers, rapists, Foyet, people of that sort), but they're a rarity.

And I like how progressive the show's attitude tends to be on a lot of issues. Pro-gay, sympathetic to prostitutes and drug users, etc. They just handle the crime with little to no judgment.

I'm not sure, either. I mean, yeah, I can see where he might've thought the main focus would be on the profiling instead of the violence when he signed up for the series, but even so...it's a crime drama. About profiling serial killers and other violent criminals. At some point the actual crime itself and its aftermath will be part of the show. One can argue about how graphic the depiction of the crimes is or should be sometimes, perhaps, and have a valid point with that (I am honestly surprised sometimes at some of the stuff the show is able to get past the censors. Especially given it's a network show airing in primetime, and not at, like, 10 at night).

But still, even if all they're doing is talking about, say, child murderers, for instance, and not actually showing a dead child, it doesn't exactly make the situation or storyline any less disturbing, does it? There are scenes on the show that have creeped me out...and no crime was being committed at the moment! Just the mention of certain statistics or information about killers can be enough to make me go, "...ew...".

From what I've heard about him, though, he seems to have a bit of a history of randomly up and leaving shows, so there's probably more to it beyond that, too. Who knows. And he's entitled to have preferences in the sorts of shows he's worked on-it's like any other person's work history, there are jobs you probably enjoyed much more than others. But it's best to keep one's opinions professional nonetheless.

Having said all that about Mandy, though, I will say that I still like the character he played. Is he my favorite one? No. Do I like Rossi better overall? Yes. But I did like the whole, "grizzled, weary vet who's seen it all" sort of deal he had going on, I liked the moments when he could be a mentor of sorts to the younger team members, and seeing him try to deal with coming back from the whole thing with the Bale case was interesting. But I can also understand if Mandy's personality and behavior after leaving the show factors into some people's dislike of Gideon, too.