"a hidden gem"

For me, the key word is "hidden."

My favorite Netflix original is "Stranger Things," but it's one of the hottest shows in the world, hardly hidden.

I also massively rate the first series of "Jessica Jones," which features a very different anti-heroic kind of hero and a particularly diabolical, and topically sick villain, in David Tennant, but a Marvel franchise, by definition, is not "hidden."

I also will refrain from picking "Altered Carbon," which was Philip K Dick heaven, in it's thematic concerns of uploading and downloading identities, as well as the class warfare of the elites against the masses. Among geek-culture, "Altered Carbon" is already legendary.

So I'm picking "Mindhunter," British playwright Joe Penhall's take on the serial killer genre.

The least popular Hannibal Lecter movie was the original, Michael Mann's "Manhunter." For me, the thematic mirroring at the center of that movie, whereby the cop sees himself in the killer, makes it the most fascinating of those movies.

"Mindhunter" goes even deeper into the psyche of serial killers by exploring real life ones in all their imprisoned boasting banality, as well as their scary quirks.

"Mindhunter" tells the story of how the FBI first learned to profile serial killers, how they learned their was such a thing as "serial killers." It documents the excitement of realizing that these monsters are in fact human, that they can be documented, understood, and that their patterns can be predicted.

By returning to that first moment of excitement, the series reinvigorates the serial killer genre, and by treating these mundane monsters as human, each killer, profiled in prison, becomes a treasure trove of mystery regarding the essence of human nature, how it works, how it malfunctions.

The hero, the FBI's first ever profiler, played by Jonathan Groff as initially unassuming and charming, becomes himself a mystery over the course of the series, as the lengths he will take to profile the killers puts us squarely in "Manhunter" territory, his inhumanity mirroring the killers' humanity.

The result is compelling, a blend of fact and fiction, that transcends and reinvigorates cliches, refreshing a tired genre, returning to a point in time where knowledge of serial killers was new, allowing us to see the genre itself anew. :)