Even for a TV procedural, Cross’ serial killer is beyond absurd

Spoiler space provides thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t reveal in ours official notification. Fair warning: This article contains spoilers for Cross‘first season.

Contemporary popular culture is obsessed with serial killers – or rather, with a certain brand of serial killer. The careful ones. They organized. Those who think of themselves as gods and plan and move through the world accordingly. These are the kinds of serial killers that populate television procedurals and page-turning paperbacks—or, as is the case in Cross, in television procedurals based on page-turning paperbacks. And if you’ve made it to the end of the Prime Video adaptation of James Patterson’s famous DC-based Black detective, you’ve found the borderline case for that particular brand of killer. In fact, “The Fanboy,” as Alex Cross (Aldis Hodge) and his team label their season-long villain, is an absurd character, a figure beyond absurdity — even by television procedural standards.

Fanboy, as his nickname indicates, is less driven by his own interests than those he admires. He would never call himself a copycat (because he doesn’t kill in the same way as his serial killer inspirations), but his whole project is very much rooted in mimicry. Over the years, it seems he hasn’t kidnapped men just to kill them. Indeed, he has gone to great lengths to mold them in the images of some of his idols, former serial killers whom he pays tribute to, before murdering his victims in the same way the killers were executed. For most of the season, The Fanboy tries to pull off one final transformation and kill: turning young Shannon Witmer (Eloise Mumford) into Aileen Wuornos, the famous killer executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002.

This being a TV show, The Fanboy doesn’t just carefully orchestrate these kills. He uses them to create a masterpiece of sorts: a scrapbook chronicling each victim’s transformation with mugshot-like portraits, newspaper clippings and even actual DNA from the OG killers. It’s all quite complicated and self-indulgent. Episode after episode we hear him refer to himself as an artist. And indeed, the more he works on Shannon to shape her into Aileen’s image—requiring everything from burning her skin, dyeing her hair, and even ruining her teeth to better match Aileen’s crooked smile—you witness someone who enjoying every part of the process. At one point he even compares himself to photographer Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee. The photojournalist was best known for his black and white street photography, where, as The Fanboy puts it, he often found traces of life amid the scenes of crime and death.

To say The Fanboy is an unnecessarily pompous guy is putting it mildly. Which is by design, since, as we find out soon enough in the season, the man behind these killings is Ed Ramsey (Ryan Eggold), a well-connected DC figure who seems to have everyone (from cops to politicians and everyone in between) under the thumb. Having come from nothing, Ramsey prides himself on being a moneyed member of the town’s high society, hosting parties that double as networking events for people he believes in (as it happens, Cross’s girlfriend, Elle (Samantha Walkers)). But of course that facade is all for show; his craven cruelty is fully present when he is left alone to play with Shannon and join his many ideas of what he thinks he is creating with these outlandish killings. He’s a hurt, self-centered asshole who, if we’re to believe Crosscan be equally charming and menacing, organized yet quick to shift gears, antisocial yet a consummate socialite. It’s all a bit much.

In Eggold’s hands, Ramsey/The Fanboy is a brilliant kind of madman, a beacon of wealth and privilege who sees other people as pawns in his own grotesque baroque schemes. He’s the kind of guy who can blackmail cops, make key witnesses disappear, and escape accountability every step of the way—all the while imagining himself as a righteous figure whose online followers (a bit of an undercooked subplot) Cross never fully explores in depth) admire for … well, it seems unclear. The very idea of ​​the “dark web” Cross imagines for Ramsey (often in a guise aimed at those who tune in to his live streams) are pretty murky and seem populated only by equally well-connected lawyers and plastic surgeons who help Ramsey for no other reason than to feed their own egos.

Which is all to say that his entire character and story (troubled kid who got into murder via a punk prank when he was young after allegedly making a sport of killing birds) is laughably absurd. Like his cave, which feels so carefully art-curated that you’d think he wanted to turn it into a gallery for others to visit and look at. Where does he print the giant mugshots? Where does he buy the necessary tools to organize an execution by lethal injection? Who is his interior designer? Oh, and that’s before we get to his other cave, the wine cellar, where he hires two guys to find evidence while his kidnapped victim is just stuck in a drawer right there?! Seriously, sometimes Ramsey’s bravado makes for the series’ most disjointed moments. One only has to look at the birthday party episode, which boggles the mind in the way it leans heavily into Ramsey being untouchable, but also that everyone around him is willfully obtuse.

Cross insists on tying his story to contemporary themes. Cross often comes into contact with people in the black community who cannot fathom why or how he would willingly be part of a system that so opposes the many men and women he grew up with. On the back of BLM and “Defund The Police” and “ACAB” – in DC of all places! –Cross initially ushers in the death of a young black man as the catalyst for the eventual hunt for The Fanboy. And throughout, Cross’s inability to prove that Ramsey is the killer (let alone a credible suspect) is tied to notions of whiteness, privilege, wealth, and impunity (and how all of that makes a perfect cocktail if you happen to be a well-liked blond philanthropist sparring with the chief of police, in between pompously talking to your kidnapped victim, whom you mutilate and torture in equal measure).

Yet Ramsey’s motives and his MO are so absurd that the very real questions of what wealthy white men can get away with (often in broad daylight and with the full-throated support of institutions clearly created to soften their grip on power ) hangs every time Cross must return to a cat-and-mouse chase between a spectacularly smart cop and a seemingly brilliant but increasingly ruthless killer who can’t imagine anyone would ever come close to catching him. Hubris, it seems, may well be the thing that all TV serial killers have in common – well, that and their ability to elude authorities, sometimes by their teeth, which Ramsey does too many times here for it to stick credible.

With Fanboy, Cross wants to tell a story about the lure of serial killers. Ramsey relishes the control he has over his victims, and he relishes the moments when he transforms them. He treats them as notches to be added to a burgeoning collection that is ultimately a miss for the killers who have come before. But in celebrating their deaths (their executions, actually), The Fanboy feels like fiction gone wrong: What is it about their goals that would cement The Fanboy as the ultimate chronicler of their achievements? That’s where the nickname feels all too appropriate (even if it annoys Ramsey, who in the end doesn’t even get to claim the kills that were supposed to make him famous). It’s all fan fiction, too flimsy to match the real thing and often too self-indulgent in not understanding what worked in the original in the first place. It’s a flurry of loud speeches and manicured scenes that never quite sync with the serious tenor and subjects (like policing and impunity) that Cross aims for.