"Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior" 1x01 - 1x06: I'm out

Well, it's official: "Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior" is Not Good. There's no need to get into too much by way of specifics, so I won't bother with a cut. Sarah Bunting is pretty on-target in that first paragraph, particularly when noting the "dialogue that assumes neither the viewers nor the characters themselves know anything about the field in which the characters work, therefore requiring exposition to explain the most elementary aspects of profiling or detective work". The characters act as if they met one another only two days ago, and the ways in which the fragments of their backstories are "worked in" are laughably clumsy. The dialogue in general is clumsy, for that matter; the line readings make me think the actors are reading literally cut-and-pasted scripts for the very first time. There is no flow, no rhythm, no tone modulation. And as violetcheetah noted while we watched the (wretched) backdoor pilot, a ragtag elite FBI team is a stupid concept. (A pardoned murderer? Right.) How did this show ever get Richard Schiff as a recurring guest?

I watch "Criminal Minds" because I like the characters a lot and I love the team. (Sidebar: Fie on all the people who put blatant spoilers for the latest episode, 6x18 "Lauren", in their open-comm-posted fic summaries and even disclaimers! I'm glad the mods are cracking down, finally.) In CM:SB, I don't care about any of these people beyond a vague annoyance ... though seeing that one actress react to a child's tearful embrace as though she'd swallowed a huge bug was on the amusing side. (Shame it was supposed to be emotional. Or something.) I don't really give a rip about the cases themselves, particularly not when they're recycling twists — not just plots, plot twists — from CM itself. The snippets we get of Garcia aren't enough, especially since they aren't bothering to synch her character with the developments in the primary show. That may be due to a scheduling snafu, but I don't care: I'm done.