QWANZ

Forest Whitaker, who played Idi Amin in the 2006 movie “The Last King of Scotland” so convincingly that he won an Oscar, has one of the most distinctive and off-kilter faces in Hollywood. So it says something about “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” that his wardrobe is so distracting that it almost overshadows his character....   >>>

Forest Whitaker, who played Idi Amin in the 2006 movie “The Last King of Scotland” so convincingly that he won an Oscar, has one of the most distinctive and off-kilter faces in Hollywood. So it says something about “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” that his wardrobe is so distracting that it almost overshadows his character.



Mr. Whitaker plays Sam Cooper, an F.B.I. profiler who hunts serial killers on this spinoff of “Criminal Minds,” which begins on Wednesday on CBS. Not surprisingly, Cooper is a brooding and enigmatic investigator with a faraway look that suggests that he is channeling the thoughts of murderous psychopaths. Cooper’s clothes, on the other hand, say, “Party like it’s 1999.”



While discussing the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl in Cleveland with his team in the opening scene, Cooper wears a double-breasted leather motorcycle jacket with epaulets and cunning leather-covered buttons. Before he arrives in Cleveland, Cooper changes into a snappy gray wool field jacket that puts him somewhere on a spectrum between Tom Ford and a Civil War re-enactor.



And there’s no real explanation for sartorial deviance on a show in which criminal deviance is already on such lavish display — except that it does stand out in a series that mostly doesn’t. “Suspect Behavior” is not boring, but it is familiar. This variation on “Criminal Minds” does away with the highfalutin quotations from Nietzsche and Conrad, but it is otherwise faithful to the original template. It is fiercely earnest and intense, with even less of the playful quirkiness that serves as comic relief on many a CBS procedural.



**This excerpt is taken from the NYT article, "On the Scent of Psychopaths: Penetrating the Criminal Mind," written by Alessandra Stanley which is linked below. Do click through to read more about this new CBS TV show.**