#and then i scroll thru the network tag for that group and every post around mine is doing numbers and mine is just. there

[flamingothing]

tag ramble

[justjasper]

this is random sry but i was scrolling thru ur cm tag and you wrote sth abt how ppl heroworshipping mandy patinking for leaving cm r embarrassing and i now wanna know why what did he do?

[rubs hands together gleefully] oh boy i don’t CM anymore but i will revisit MP wank anytime lol. i haven’t sourced any of this bc the links are way back somewhere but they do exist

so basically, you need to have this in mind - criminal minds is about serial killers, and an elite group of people who hunt serial killers. and when the show first came out they had a couple of actual retired fbi consultants working on it to make it accurate and such.

it did mean they were a lot of dead women. women are most likely to be the victim of serial killers, so they often were week to week on cm. but, like, compared to other crime procedurals of the same time, criminal minds (seasons 1-5) was one of the best in terms of not glorifying harm to victims and respect to living victims within the narrative.

so come the end of season 2, and patinkin’s character gideon has a big arc where a serial killer he let escape comes back and kills his girlfriend. at the end of this arc, gideon is meant to kill himself. this would make 100% narrative sense for the character, considering his arcs for the first 2 seasons and his backstory, but...

mandy patinkin refused. without actually talking to anyone about it (and he was the Big Star, so the cards were all in his hands re getting the writers to take another angle imo) just refused and didn’t show up to set. didn’t tell anyone, just stopped turning up. this is incredibly unprofessional - it fucks with everyone on the show. 

they ended up having to rejig a bunch of episodes and have him drive off into the sunset never to be seen again.

then patinkin starts talking about how he left criminal minds because it was “destructive to his soul” and how he couldn’t stand all the torture of women etc.

but the thing is, in the seasons he was in, there really wasn’t that much torture. yes it was dark, but he signed up for a show about serial killers, and to compare CM of the time to the likes of CSI isn’t fair - god i loved csi back in the day don’t get me wrong, but their “shock are gore” approach is something CM did not do in the early seasons (post s5 cm is a whole other post about failed spin offs and network interference)

he’s called CM misogynistic too, and yeah it had problems and theres definitely something to be said that an entertainment genre (crime procedurals) that are build on the suffering of women is ~Problematic~ but within the field of those, CM really was not a bad egg

and this would have been fine, if he’d just said his piece. maybe it was “destructive to his soul”, but he went on to star in Homeland, so he obviously hates misogyny and loves racism, and years later he’s still bleating about how had cm was while starring in another show with plenty of issues

also cm was the first show he bailed on, and apparently he’s quite difficult to work with

every time someone brought up gideon returning, the producers/writers would basically say “no gideon’s dead” - none of them have ever shown any interest in working with patinkin again, even if he wanted to come back.

and then eventually they killed gideon off in the narrative without inviting patinkin back in what was one of the better late season episodes tbh. like, theyd clearly been dying to do this for years so people would stop crying about gideon returning.

at the end of the day i don’t think patinkin was brave or was making a stand for women i think he just wanted out and to not feel a jerk for screwing everyone around lol