I Watch TV: Prodigal Son

Prodigal Son

He’s a criminal profiler, his dad’s a serial killer locked up in a mental hospital. Together they fight crime!

No, this is actually the show. It’s a police procedural that leans into the grotesque and macabre elements in a slightly unusual way. Malcolm Bright is quite seriously mentally unstable, with a tremor, hallucinations, PTSD and needs to restrain himself to sleep. He’s fired from the FBI at the start after attacking a sheriff who shot a serial killer Bright had just convinced to surrender. Later a professional bondage guy is handcuffed to a bomb and the only way to rescue him is to cut his hand off.

The show goes out of its way to try and shock and surprise and occasionally pulls it off.

Martin Whitley, known as “The Surgeon” because 1. He was (and is) a surgeon and 2. Because his serial killings had surgical precision (and also a layer of wit from what we occasionally see – there are a whole bunch of copycat and/or connected to him cases), is an amiable monster in a cage. His only real concern is Malcolm, who he thinks is like him. And he is, damaged and obsessive, but significantly less murderous. “My boy,” is how he refers to him, with something of the possessive; he’s described as a malignant narcissist. He does occasionally offer some goodwill to his daughter Ashley, a TV reporter.

He doesn’t have much for his wife, who is extremely rich and also an alcoholic, something no one blames her for, after all her husband was a serial killer. This is probably the main place the show seems to lose itself over mental illness and diagnosis (a big part of Bright’s profiling). Yes, she’s always drinking and a high-functioning alcoholic but it doesn’t inform anything or go anywhere.

Watch This: For a police procedural with a bit of a hook and some good character work
Don’t Watch This: If the pathologising of mental illness into murder is going to turn you off