For those of you who are interested in the fast-paced, Criminal Minds, Psycho-pass, Mindhunter stuff, this is not for you.
As a social worker, I need to know and understand the motivations of my clients that I might be able to work through the sessions and case interventions.
A lot of such work isn't glitz and glamour. And I wouldn't expect a criminologist's work to be anything different, because we're all working with a segment of the population that presents with pathological tendencies toward certain behaviours. To know a person is through the available material on them, as well the processes through which information is gathered to build a profile.
It's not all about diagnoses - because a diagnosis is not fixed and usually can shift. It's after all a diagnostic tool to describe a symptoms which are currently presenting, and this show's - IMO - not supposed to be a show about prescribed approaches.
Profiling is inexact and the thing the show does is show how challenging it is to not even close to halfway understanding how psychopathy operates in different types of people because of the complexities of particular human experience in-situ.
It's pretty informative, which I found was quite decent in this documentary. Could it be improved with more elaboration on concepts and assumptions? Perhaps - but that might cause viewers to think they can replicate that without the proper training. So there's tension between viewer expectation and the professional's responsibility.
Lastly, if you watch it with pre-conceived notions about what it would be like, you probably have been captured by the pizzazz of mainstream fodder like the overly dramatised crime shows of the last 2 decades, and may be on the way to losing a sense of realism.
