Mandy Patinkin Left Criminal Minds Over Show’s Subversive Misogyny

Look at that perfect face. Remember his Patch Adams clown phase on Chicago Hope? Let’s discuss it.

Back in college I had this one roommate (who definitely doesn’t write for this site no sirree bob) who was obsessed with Mandy Patinkin. To the point that we watched Sunday in the Park With George AND Yentl together. She to see Mandy’s bare bottom and sublime singing voice. Me because we only had one tv in the room and I had nothing better to do.

Seeing him on all those fuzzy VHS tapes and remembering him from Chicago Hope I had some fond memories. So I was kind of confused when he took a paycheck and appeared for two seasons on Criminal Minds which took that one gross episode of X-Files and turned it into an eight season slog on CBS with incredibly high turnover of actresses and Patinkins.

I mean the guy just seemed too cool to spend twenty-two hours on my tv each year looking at dead ladies and grumbling about the monsters among us.

And he was!

During press for Homeland season 2 he mentioned his two-year tenure on the show and his reason for leaving it:

I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year.

In the same breath he also mentions how the show damaged his soul and was the worst decision he ever made in his life.

Yeowch.

Also kind of great and relatable?

Last year I played a good twenty hours of L.A. Noire. I spent nearly every hour of the day rifling through the bodies of dead and beaten women and it depressed me to no end. Ultraviolent police procedurals, whether games or television, need only a little to go a very long way.

And their effects are cumulative. In order to watch them or be entertained by them we must, by necessity, disassociate ourselves from the victims on the screen. And every time we do that it makes it a little easier for us to disassociate ourselves from the victims in real life.

In the interview Patinkin mentions meeting Bill Clinton, who apparently mainlined Homeland over two days. It’s easy to marathon watch a show like that. With its quick pace and big ideas you come away feeling like you’ve devoured a particularly good book.

But Criminal Minds? I honestly can’t imagine how you could marathon that show and not start to feel at least a little angry or sullen about the world around you.

Source [New York Magazine]