THERE was some dissention in the ranks (as in rank-and-file fans) of “Criminal Minds” when Broadway veteran, movie actor and Emmy winner Joe Mantegna this season took on the role of David Rossi, replacing series star Mandy Patinkin.
Change, after all, is hard – in life and on your favorite TV shows.
But Mantegna has, for my tax dollars, been a more-than-good FBI replacement for Patinkin, who stomped off the show over “creative differences.” (The bad news is that while Patinkin was very good as head of the unit, he is now free to sing again.)
Tonight the show returns with its first new episode following the writers’ strike, and if you suspend disbelief long enough to get into it, you’ll be a happy TV viewer.
If you were following the show, you know that Rossi, a founding member of the FBI’s Behavorial Analysis Unit (BAU), had taken early retirement to write and lecture, but was drawn back to the unit for some cockamamie reason or other.
Tonight, we find out that Rossi is a haunted man. Not by ghosts of a spectral nature, but by ghosts of what he saw 20 years earlier on the job which he can never forget.
After working a routine FBI case in another state, Rossi was getting a ride back to the airport from a local detective. The detective gets a radio call of kids screaming and asks Rossi if he’d mind going with him to the scene.
What they find there has haunted Rossi ever since – three little kids screaming over the bodies of their parents who’d been hacked to death with an ax.
On his own, Rossi travels back to the scene and, we learn, buys the house where the murder took place.
Simultaneously, Aaron Hochner (Thomas Gibson) and Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) pay a visit to a serial killer on death row to see if they can get insights into the minds of such people.
Hochner isn’t much use since he’s practically losing his own mind – what with his divorce and all. But the scene in the locked room with the psycho-killer loony is pretty darned good.
Hochner wants violence and Reid wants to settle things by using psychological tricks. Good scene, even if the premise is completely ridiculous.
Like I said, suspend disbelief, and you’re 80 percent there.
Worried about Rossi, his team (A.J. Cook and Shemar Moore) takes the “company” jet (are you kidding me?) to find him at the 20-year-old crime scene.
The kids , now grown, have fallen on hard times, and it’s up to Rossi to save their wretched lives by solving the riddle of who killed their parents and their once-happy lives.
The unraveling of the riddle is one of the best reasons for watching the show.
Good stuff. Welcome back.
“Criminal Minds”
Tonight at 9 on CBS