#sorry ik it spikes my anxiety when someone rbs with a giant block of text so i just wanna be clear i think ur correct and ur points mirror

[aardvaark]

leverage creator john rogers discussing "the two live crew job" (s2e7) scene where nate & sophie grift a woman by insinuating her boss is a criminal minds-style serial killer (warning for brief rape/murder/assault mentions, abridged, find the full thing here):

Short answer is, we were pretty obviously parodying the culture of fear bullshit, particularly the modern American procedural, sold in American media. I'd think the addition of "wood chipper" to the run would have made that obvious. Wood. Chipper. Hellloooo Criminal Minds. […]

[Leverage] is not one of the dozen or so mainstream network shows that traffic in exploiting rape, sexual murder, and an irrational fear of violent super-predators. […]

Cruise through the thick airport best-sellers and you find a parade of cunning rapists, insane serial killers and mocking pedophiles with a tendency toward baroque clue construction. The CSI shows are rape/murdertastic, and the original CSI in particular basically equates anything outside total heteronormativity with perversion deserving of a horrible death, after which sincere CSI squares cluck their tongues and solve your murder that, hey, you kinda brought on yourself anyway.

Now, those dudes are writing crime thrillers, those are the streets they walk. I'm a big fan of those shows (I actually prefer L&O: Criminal Intent, but you know), and accept that they are working withing those bounds. […]

The casual mainstreaming of gory/sexual violence used to give a frisson of horror to mass culture. We don't do it, we were mocking it, and the whole show was conceived as a rejection of those boogiemen in a quest to go after some actual villains doing big-time damage to people's lives. As Downey said, back when we were developing the show: "I think everybody else on TV has got serial killers covered."

We exploit pain and misery too, parasites of culture that we are, but at least it's in going after villains everybody else seems to be ignoring.

importantly, criminal minds and leverage very much did overlap, and so it’s very interesting & insightful to compare the two! leverage still spouts copaganda in many parts, it’s not some perfect morally pure show and it would be silly to put it on that pedestal - but it also very much diverged from a lot of its contemporaries in the genre (including other crime shows i watch & enjoy).

Leverage and Criminal Minds are mirror opposites of each other

an elite team of hyper competent people travel around fighting evil by getting into the heads of bad guys (and/or punching them)

But one is outside the law, one is the law. One is premised on the idea that evil in the world is a result of systemic problems, the other that it originates in lone evil individuals.

And Leverage, despite being not really all that good, is excellent. While Criminal Minds, despite being actually quite good, is not good.