Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior

Note I couldn't watch it but hope to get to catch up with it. I wanted to watch this.

Source: TvGuide Online IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE EP BEWARE SPOILERS POSSIBLE IN ARTICLE.

'Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior' premiere review: Forest Whitaker kept 'body, mind, and spirit in balance.' Will you keep watching this show?

In the spin-off series Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, we are spared the trademark Criminal Minds voice-over recitation from some Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations-level philosopher. But we’re not spared the reason viewers by the millions tune in to the original Minds: To watch the suffering of the helpless, rescued by the earnest, the brave, and the eccentric.

In Wednesday night’s premiere, the helpless were little girls kidnapped and kept captive by a guy who’d set the girls up in pretty pink bedrooms; he had a motive, and a psychological problem, for doing this, but what comes pouring through the TV screen are the images of children terrorized — they overwhelm, block out, any of the real research or pseudo jargon the show ladles into the dialogue to have the viewer understand a senseless crime. Make no mistake about it: The Criminal Minds franchise is out to scare you, pure and simple.

Into this has walked Forest Whitaker heading up a new batch of FBI Behavioral Analysts. He brings with him a placid calmness combined, as we saw in the opening scenes, an interest in martial arts — kick-boxing, stick-fighting — which his character, Sam Cooper, says keeps “mind and body and spirit in balance.” It reminded me of Whitaker in the 1999 Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, only without the delicate, poetic imagery. Cooper does that Criminal Minds thing of talking as though he’s the criminal, working through the evil one’s psyche and motives until he chats himself into a brilliant insight into the criminal mind.

Suspect Behavior introduced us to a new bunch of people who are going to use the phrase “UNSUB” a lot, including Janeane Garofalo, transitioning smoothly from her dramatic role in 24 to this crew. I’ve seen the second episode of Suspect Behavior, and Garofalo’s Beth Griffith has the easiest, most believable working relationship with Whitaker’s Cooper; I wouldn’t go so far as to call it chemistry, because Criminal Minds is all about intelligent isolators brought together solely by work.

A bridge between the two Minds shows is Kirsten Vangsness’ Penelope Garcia, the tech wiz who’ll toggle back and forth between the two shows, pulling up data absurdly fast while uttering chatty banalities like, “The Divine Miss G — out!“

Five seasons from now, when CM:SB is in syndication and a well-oiled machine, many viewers will have long forgotten one of the debut hour’s chief bits of business. Michael Kelly’s “Prophet” Sims once killed a child molester and so at the start of the show was a “special agent pending,” under close scrutiny as a guy whose temper might not permit him to make it onto the show’s team. By the end, however, he had his redemption scene — cornering the bad guy and saying, “I killed a guy like you before… [it] wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be” — and opting not to kill this man.

Sold! Prophet’s a keeper: He was upgraded to “full agent” status with the support of Whitaker’s Cooper and Richard Schiff as the group’s boss, Jack Fickler. Schiff seemed to hold himself back a little from his dialogue, much as Joe Mantegna does on CM, as though neither of them wants their images to bond too closely to these shows.

 

I liked this episode much better than the spin-off one that aired during Criminal Minds in the fall. Forest Whitaker makes a credible team leader, and I like the other characters as well. I'm interested to learn more about them. That said, I'm a little cool on Janeane Garofalo's character; I hope she develops some personality. It's still early for her, and the show, so I'm willing to give them a chance. Team chemistry is what will ultimately carry this show. So far, so good, IMO.

 

Criminal Minds Suspect Behavior
10:00-10:30 13.077 million viewers 3.3/10 18-24 demo
10:30-11:00 12.741 million viewers 3.2/10 18-24 demo

That was 2x the viewers of Law & Order: SVU and 3x that of Off The Map

A great start.

 

Source: Yahoo "omg"

Forest Whitaker on 'Criminal Minds' spinoff Video


Yeah I love this from TvGuide Online which is what I believe you were talking about.

Ratings: Two Minds Are Better Than One?

Two Minds are better than one?

The premiere of Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior rounded up 12.9 million viewers in prime time's final hour Wednesday night, building slightly on the 12.8 million people who watched Criminal Minds at 9/8c, according to preliminary Nielsen figures.

The new show attracted the largest audience CBS has gotten in that time slot in more than a year.

For More Click Here

 

But the fact is that also according to the Nielson ratings, a lot of viewers stopped watching Suspect Behavior, tuning out halfway through. It lost viewers in its second half, in other words. And it got mostly very bad reviews. It seems like TV Guide are the only reviewers who think its good.

 

The premiere was good. I'm still not getting the team chemistry. Need more time. The case wasn't thrilling enough, not impressive.

 

I thought it was ok. Not great, but not awful enough to not give it another chance.

To me, the two leads, FW and JG, are the two weak links because they just seem like cardboard characters at this point.

I didn't like Prophet in last year's backdoor pilot, but he really shined in this episode.

Beau Garrett, Gina, hasn't been given much, but I've seen her on both Burn Notice and The Glades during the past year, and she's a very attractive woman with a distinctive acting ability that I hope they fully utilize.

As for Matt Ryan, Mick, he's just too f'ing HOT!!!!!! I'd watch the show just for him. :drool:

 

Source: Yahoo News.

Forest Whitaker fights crime on 'Suspect Behavior'

NEW YORK – Forest Whitaker is one terrific actor. From his start two decades ago in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," he has logged powerful performances in such films as "Platoon," "Bird," "The Crying Game" and "Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai," and in a season-long arc of the acclaimed TV drama "The Shield." For his portrayal of mad Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006's "The Last King of Scotland," he won an Oscar for best actor.

But don't think of Whitaker as only an actor. Think of him as a student — he does.

"Constantly, constantly," he says in his disarming, feathery voice. "I like to continue to explore."

Now for Whitaker the exploration is continuing on, of all things, a spinoff of the 6-year-old CBS procedural "Criminal Minds."

In "Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior" (which premiered to a hit-size audience last week and airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST, right after its progenitor), Whitaker plays Special Agent Sam Cooper, who heads up an elite team of agents within the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, charged with capturing the nation's most nefarious criminals (or at least some of the bad guys the other show doesn't nab).

The new CBS series follows a tried-and-true storytelling formula. But Whitaker, who says he signed on early in the development process and helped shape his role, sees "Suspect Behavior" as a character study as much as a procedural.

"My character is trying to uncover light," Whitaker says over diet colas in Manhattan last week. "He feels every person has inside of him a light, and he's stripping away all the things that cover it in shadows so he can get to the source. And from that discovery he hopefully can find a common ground."

That's a lot to expect for anybody — bonding one week with a lowlife who abducts little girls, another week with a psycho who gouges out the eyes of her victim.

But as Sam Cooper says to a colleague on the show, "You have to know them. Can't be afraid."

And in a future episode,

Spoiler: Spoiler

even Cooper himself becomes the perpetrator.

"In a way, at least, I'm put in that position," Whitaker confides. "The writers are confronting the question, 'What are any of us capable of?' If we can get understanding, we can find compassion, and if compassion occurs and grows big enough, theoretically you should find love. That's what I'm really looking for: Where we're all one thing."

With that, he chuckles at himself and his lofty-sounding talk.

In person, the 49-year-old Whitaker doesn't come across as an actor of kaleidoscopic proportions. At 6 feet and 2 inches, he is more like an oversized teddy bear, with a friendly manner, his distinctive drooping eyelid (he was born with it) and a blinding smile.

Born in Longview, Texas, Whitaker grew up in Los Angeles, where his success in high school football landed him an athletic scholarship at Cal State Fullerton. Then he transferred to the University of Southern California to study voice on a music scholarship. Then he made the shift to drama.

But along with what he learned in drama classes, he applied knowledge gleaned from martial arts and Eastern philosophy, which he began studying as a youngster.

He cites this lesson be borrowed from the dojo: "You should understand that everything doesn't go in a straight line, that some things go down and up and move around in order to get to a target.

"Of any principle in acting," says Whitaker, "I think of that more than anything else."


Whitaker's dodgy path to discovering a character typically leads him through exhaustive preparation.

"When I start a part, normally, I don't know where to begin," he notes. "And always I figure, I better try to start with the truth. So I find out some information."

To prepare for his role on "Suspect Behavior," he spent time at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va.

But in the past, such as "Last King," he was known to withdraw into his rigorously created character, on- and off-set throughout a film's production. That's a total-immersion process he's rejecting on the new series.

"At times, I was more of a hermit, kind of socially inept," he explains, adding, "I'm better with people than I used to be," and speaks happily of being part of a family on "Suspect Behavior" that might be together for years. Having wrapped the 13 episodes of its first season, he reports, "I like the cast and the crew and the writers."

Meanwhile, he has found time within his series commitment to pursue other projects. The director of several films, he aims to do more, and among his credits as producer is "Brick City," a Peabody Award-winning docuseries aired by Sundance Channel focusing on Newark, N.J., and that troubled city's charismatic mayor, Cory Booker.

It's all part of Whitaker's devotion to being a student.

"When I was a little kid," he recalls, "I wanted to be an ethologist. I had learned that word for an animal behaviorist and I remember saying to my mom, 'If you really look at people and listen to them, you can discover who they are and where they live and what they've done.'
"So, in a way, what I'm doing now is pursuing that. I've got the perfect job to keep exploring what I'm interested in."

 

Beau is a decent actress, and she is very attractive when she's not trudging around in those horrible outfits and that Mohawk-ponytail. I just want to see their developing her character a little more.

 

Saw the first one and thought it was pretty good. JG is the weakest link in my opinion and even though I think FW is an amazing actor I'm still not 100% convinced on how he is portraying this character. It's too structured and a little predictable. Granted it's the first episode so obviously it's not going to be all figured out. The other characters I did enjoy.

 

The first three episodes have been really good, but I think Whitaker is seriously overacting. I'm still loving the fact Prophet wears a Braves hat.