Netflix cancelled its best crime show before most people found it

Netflix may be one of the best streaming services out there, but it has drawbacks. For one thing, it's infamous for canceling beloved series, a hazard when you produce so much content. Business realities being what they are, it's too much to expect Netflix to keep producing new seasons of every series that isn't performing well enough to justify their cost, but sometimes they give the axe to popular, critically lauded TV shows you'd figure were worth continuing.

One of the best examples is Mindhunter, a sterling crime series that takes full advantage of our obsession with serial killers, presented in a prestige TV package. Even nearly a decade later, losing this show still smarts.

Mindhunter still holds up

And then some

Mindhunter is set in the late 1970s, the golden age of American serial killers. It follows FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff in one of his breakout roles) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) as they operate the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, then a new department. The idea of approaching crime from a psychological perspective was new at the time, and the agents get a lot of pushback as they try to prove it has worth. Together with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), their intention is to interview serial killers with the hope of getting insights they can apply to ongoing cases.

Mindhunter starts with a great cast and builds from there. Holden, Bill, and Wendy have great chemistry, with the young and ambitious Holden sometimes rubbing the more traditional, by-the-book Bill the wrong way. The show really comes alive during the interview segments with the serial killers. In the United States, these figures have a kind of perverse celebrity, and the show clearly takes a lot of pride in getting the details right. Holden and Bill talk with the likes of Jack Erdie (Richard Speck), David Berkowitz (aka the Son of Sam, played by Oliver Cooper), Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson), and more.

Mindhunter has a cool, pristine, very specific tone that can probably be largely attributed to David Fincher, who directed several of the episodes and who served as the de facto showrunner; reportedly, he hung around the set a lot even on episodes he didn't direct, overseeing everything. Fincher has directed multiple classic movies about serial killers, including Se7en and Zodiac, so to have a whole show from him on the subject feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event.

The sad, long cancellation of Mindhunter

Netflix drew this one out

David Fincher being such a high-profile figure may have contributed to the end of Mindhunter. The second season dropped on Netflix in 2019, after which it was put on hold while Fincher worked on the Netflix movie Mank, about the making of Citizen Kane. In 2020, the actors were released from their contracts, with a Netflix spokesperson saying that it would be unfair to keep them waiting while Fincher worked on other projects. Later that year, Fincher confirmed that the series was over, at least for now.

That's the official story, although there may have been other factors at play. "It had a very passionate audience, but we never got the numbers that justified the cost," Fincher said later. There were also issues behind the scenes of the second season, with many of the scripts for the episodes getting scrapped and rewritten.

Fincher (who's also behind great movies like Fight Club and The Social Network, if you want more proof of his pedigree) is known as a perfectionist. Perfectionism is hard enough to sustain on the set of a movie, let alone over the course of a TV show.

Mindhunter Season 3?

It's not completely impossible

Fincher reportedly planned out five seasons of Mindhunter. There was very obviously a lot of story left at the end of Season 2. Throughout the first two seasons, we get glimpses of Dennis Rader (Sonny Valicenti), a man who would go on to become known as the BTK Killer, out in the world, committing murder. The prospect of Holden, Bill, and Wendy catching him is very enticing, but we never got to see it.

That said, all hope is not lost. In 2025, Holt McCallany revealed that he'd met with David Fincher, who has ideas for continuing the story with a trio of two-hour movies. Nothing's guaranteed — for one thing, Jonathan Groff has become a pretty big star in the years since Mindhunter, so the movies would have to account for his schedule as well as Fincher's — but a continuation is at least possible.

Further watching

Even if Mindhunter never comes back, it's not as though there's a lack of good crime shows out there. Whether you like your crime dramas based on real events or invented out of whole cloth, it's a well-supplied genre. But there was something special about Mindhunter's cold, clinical approach to the grisliest possible subject matter, and as long as there's even the slightest hope it could return, we'll keep a candle lit for it.