There are certain betrayals you expect in life.
Airline food. Hotel coffee. A promising taco stand that turns out to be a culinary war crime.
You brace for those.
What you don’t brace for is a streaming giant pulling the plug on Mindhunter, a show so meticulously crafted it felt less like television and more like a slow, surgical autopsy of the American psyche.
They didn’t cancel it with a bang. They just let it bleed out.
And I took that personally. It’s been a few years and I’m still upset the more I ponder what could have been.
The first time I watched it, I didn’t know who Jonathan Groff was. Didn’t watch Glee. Wasn’t part of that choir of aggressively enthusiastic high school jazz hands. I knew it was on. I watched Community mock it and I understood those jokes.
So to me, Groff wasn’t “that guy from Glee.” He was Holden Ford — coiled, obsessive, unsettlingly earnest. The kind of man who would lean too far into the abyss because he needed to understand it.https://youtu.be/DHJO6VR6TYY?si=bJ1_f__AjyqDz8tT
There’s a stillness to his performance in Mindhunter. A quiet hunger. He plays curiosity like it’s a disease.
And then, much later — embarrassingly late — I discover this same man once strutted across Broadway as King George in Hamilton.
Not a brooding FBI profiler.
A powdered-wig monarch in red velvet, singing about sending a battalion to remind you he’ll kill your friends and family to show his love.
You’re kidding me.
The same actor who studies serial killers with clinical detachment is also the pettiest ex-boyfriend in the American Revolution, shimmying under stage lights?
That’s not range. That’s sorcery.
Like I said, I was not paying attention.
I missed both trains. Didn’t know Groff. Didn’t catch Hamilton when it detonated into the culture. I arrived at the party when the confetti was already swept into industrial trash bags.
So now I’m sitting there, years too late, connecting dots that everyone else mapped out long ago. Watching clips of him in a crown, grinning like a baroque menace, and realizing I’d already watched him interrogate monsters in gray suits.
And Netflix had the audacity to cancel the darker one.
They kept the neon sugar rush. The shows that feel like they were focus grouped by a committee of interns with caffeine tremors. But Mindhunter? David Fincher’s slow, deliberate descent into the American subconscious? The series that trusted silence like a weapon and treated evil like paperwork?
Gone.
We were just warming up the BTK file. Just beginning to understand that the monster was not in the room. It was in the margins. And then, poof. Corporate shrug. A polite email. The algorithm moved on.
You can practically hear Holden Ford trying to process it.
“Why would they terminate a long form psychological study mid experiment?”
“Budget allocation,” some executive says, adjusting a blazer.
It is the kind of betrayal that makes you swirl your drink a little longer than necessary and contemplate vengeance through passive aggressive subscription management.
But here is the twist.
Now that I know Groff is also the powdered monarch from Hamilton, something in my brain refuses to let this go quietly. Because once you have seen him interrogate killers with surgical intensity and sing about sending battalions with a smirk, you realize the universe missed an opportunity.
I do not want Mindhunter back the way it was.
I want a spinoff.
Picture it. Holden Ford, exhausted, unraveling, buried in case files. The fluorescent lights hum. The tape recorder clicks on.
Across the table sits King George III. Full regalia. Crown. Velvet. Lace cuffs. Completely unbothered.
Holden leans forward. “Tell me about the need for control.”
George smiles. “You say the price of my love is not a price that you are willing to pay.”
Now we are cooking.
A psychological profiler interrogating a petty monarch obsessed with loyalty, abandonment, and punitive affection. Not a musical. A character study. The Revolution as attachment disorder. The British Empire as a case file.
You think I am joking. I am not.
Groff could play both sides of that table. One half rigid with intellectual hunger. The other half gleefully theatrical, convinced he is right because he is crowned.
The line between tyrant and tactician gets thin in a hurry.
Some actors build careers.
Others build myths.
Groff builds a multiverse where the same face can wear a wiretap or a wig and make you believe both.
Netflix canceled one timeline. Fine.
In my head, the crossover already exists.
And this time, I am not late to the party.
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