The mind of a criminal is a dark and complex place, and the Behavioural Analysis Unit team on Criminal Minds (Seven, 8.30pm) explores the darkest and most complex among them. Although the title is fairly broad, the BAU isn't unlocking the psyches of pickpockets or those people who take shopping trolleys home with them: they deal with the worst of humanity, the most savage and depraved of killers. It is famously the show which Mandy Patinkin quit because it was too gruesome, so he could move on to the more positive and life-affirming Homeland.
This is the season nine finale of Criminal Minds – it's yet another of the US crime shows that grow all over schedules like creeper vines, and manage to rack up lengthy runs before you've noticed. As the subject matter – and Mandy's departure – suggests, it's a grim series that keeps Hollywood's fake blood manufacturers in steady employment. But it's not just the grimness that sets the show apart from the oft-multiplying likes of the CSI and NCIS franchises – although its more brutal approach does make murder feel a tad more serious than in those other programs. Rather, it's the melancholy air that hangs over the show. When, in the season finale, Rossi (Joe "Fat Tony from the Simpsons" Mantegna) tells the story about how his quest to protect the world from monsters ended his marriage, it seems a fair microcosm of the show as a whole. These men and women catch the bad guys, but it doesn't make everything all right – the world is too sad a place. Later on there's more heart-wrenching, as the case the BAU gang is working on leads to painful revelation for one team member. It's not the happiest of notes to end a season on, but it's possible that a show about homicidal maniacs shouldn't really be trying to be all that happy.
If there's a complaint to be made about this episode, it's that there's a lot of criminality, not all that much "mind" to it. Narrative necessity demands that the writers come up with a more diverse set of motives for their villains than week after week of "he's just crazy", and so we get an extremely television-ish plot, where murder leads to conspiracy, which leads to shootouts and punch-ups. Meanwhile, one of the team's life hangs in the balance, which is only to be expected.
If murder's not your thing, maybe you'd like to check out the 2014 ARIA Awards (Ten, 8pm). Or maybe you wouldn't – it's definitely a risk tuning in to what has in previous years set new benchmarks for disastrously bad awards shows. If they had any sense they'd go back to the days of the King and Queen of Pop – at least when John Paul Young wore a crown, nobody was pretending to take it seriously.
