Criminal Minds since its 2005 debut on CBS has regularly dealt with dark subject matter. (Just ask Mandy Patinkin.) But the most recent season of the crime drama (and the second to stream on Paramount+), has been literally too dark in the eye of many viewers.
To wit, here are but a few of the comments made on TVLine’s end-of-season post mortem Q&A with showrunner Erica Messer:
“You forgot the most important question about next season: will we finally be able to SEE wtf is going on??”
“I would have given the season an A [grade] but the [literal] darkness of each episode… made it so hard to see! I persevered but there were many times I threatened to leave.”
“I’d just really like to be able to see what is happening on the screen. Why is the cinematography so dark?”
TVLine recently shed light (so to speak) on the Season 17 issue, when the still photos shot on-set for Episode 6 (aka Prentiss Gets Stoned) looked dramatically different from what we were presented with on Paramount+. See the comparison below:
Mind you, that bottom screenshot (of Paramount+ on a MacBook Pro) was manually brightened by yours truly, just to give it a fighting chance.
TVLine asked showrunner Messer if she was aware of the sometimes-inscrutably dark scenes from Season 17, and the short answer is that, yes, she is. But she only can theorize that the compression of the video file for streaming is to blame, since “the show that we’re delivering [to Paramount+] is not dark.”
“You know, I have heard [about this issue]. You’re not the first to mention it,” Messer told TVLine. “And I’ve talked to my DP [director of photography] about it and even [people on] the technical side….
“The show that we’re delivering, that we’re all [seeing] in the mix stage and we’re all giving the thumbs-up to, is not dark, so I don’t know what’s happening,” she avowed.
Nor does Messer think that such scenes are always too dark; in her own personal experience, it can depend on where you’re streaming the show.
“I know that when I watch it on my computer it’s darker, because it’s getting compressed,” Messer noted. But, “When I watch it on [TV] it’s brighter than it is on the soundstage — and it actually annoys me. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s my TV, maybe there’s some setting [to adjust]….’ But no, because I watch other things on Paramount+ or Apple TV and they’re moody, exactly what they should be.”
Vulture last November did a piece on TV becoming too dark to see, and one of the cinematographers they spoke to said that during this #PeakTV era, “There’ve been a lot of people making TV very fast…. Things are pre-produced, produced, and then distributed to postproduction, and then sent back to the streamers in a very short time span. All these factors lend themselves to these low light levels.”
That same expert noted that when it comes to rendering very dark scenes discernibly, “Certain TV brands are better than others,” while “each streamer … has a different compression or a different way of transmitting the image. It’s going to look different for everyone since there are so many variables.”
Criminal Minds: Evolution‘s Messer had to wonder if the majority of the “too dark” complaints were coming from an audience that largely streams the show on laptop computers versus an actual TV.
“Streaming [series] I think might get watched more on computers than on TV anymore,” the EP posited. “I know it’s dark on my computer but it’s not dark on my television. And I know what we’re delivering is not dark.”
TVLine has reached to Paramount+ for comment on the disparity in viewing experiences.