Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior is a Spin-Off of the popular Police Procedural Criminal Minds. Starring Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker as Sam Cooper, Suspect Behavior centers on a BAU Red Cell, a team that "operates outside normal FBI bureaucracy". Accompanying him are former SAS Mick Rawson, Ex-Con turned FBI agent Jonathan "Prophet" Simms, young prodigy Gina LaSalle, and experienced agent Beth Griffith. Crossing over from Criminal Minds is Penelope Garcia as their resident tech expert.
The show started with a Backdoor Pilot (sans Beth) where the original team of Criminal Minds had to team up with the Red Cell to end a series of kidnappings and murders. The series proper premiered in 2011. The show seemed to aim for a slightly more Darker and Edgier tone than its original counterpart.
It was cancelled after one season in 2011.
This series provides examples of:
- Always Murder: Sometimes kidnapping, but even those tend to have a murder element.
- Anachronic Order: In the first episode, Beth is already part of the team. In "Here is the Fire", which aired later, it's clear she's just meeting them for the first time.
- An Arm and a Leg: The MO of the villain in "Jane" is dismembering his victims with a bandsaw.
- Asshole Victim: A politician is almost murdered by his schizophrenic son because he abandoned both him and his sister because of their mental problems, leaving them to grow up in foster care and poverty while he started a new, normal family.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- "See No Evil": The set-up of the Cold Open makes it seem like an old man is about to abduct/kill a woman having car trouble... until the woman jabs the guy in the neck with a syringe that is. Then, later when the team are theorizing their unsub could be a grieving widow who works as a nurse, we're shown a nurse walking into a room to deal with a patient. As the nurse begins an examination of said patient, the latter attacks her.
- "Here is the Fire": The Cold Open focuses on a principal who's walking around school, nervous, clearly troubled by something, and carrying his bag in a suspicious manner before announcing over the speaker for everyone to go the cafeteria. Not long after, a bomb goes off. Turns out, he's not the villain, he was acting that way because he just got diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma.
- Batter Up!: The spree killer in "Nighthawk" beats his victims to death with an aluminum baseball bat.
- Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Gina, Beth and Garcia.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The killer in "Jane" goes to get a beer out of his fridge, revealing that's also where he keeps the severed heads of his victims.
- Broken-Window Warning: The unsub's main harasser in "Nighthawk" throws a brick through his window with a note attached and toward the end of the episode when the former comes to confront the jerk, he smashes the windows on the guy's house.
- Canon Discontinuity: Mothership producers like Mark Gordon and Erica Messer consider that this spin-off was a "misstep" that "tried too hard to be different". That it was
not referenced in the mother series after the season that included the Poorly Disguised Pilot or there was no attempt to resolve the show's cliffhanger there speaks for itself. - Chalk Outline: One is drawn where the opening victims of "One Shot Kill" and "Jane" died.
- Character Overlap: The character Penelope Garcia is the technical analyst in both this and Criminal Minds.
- Cliffhanger: The first season finale (and
final episode) ends on one of the worst since the ending of The Sopranos. - Cold Sniper: The long-distance serial killer in "One Shot Kill" is a homegrown one that snipes random people as practice for a massacre he intends on committing at his father's funeral.
- Consulting a Convicted Killer: In "Lonely Heart", the team try to get information from an incarcerated serial killer whose MO is near identical to the present unsub they're hunting.
- Cryptic Background Reference: What Cooper and Mick saw and did in Fallujah that still haunts them.
- Darker and Edgier: Leather-clad FBI agents that operate out of a dilapidated gym because they are "outside bureaucracy" and include an ex-Con, a British sniper and an Army Veteran martial arts-trained profiler Catholic priest. And that's without even getting to the cases.
- Dead All Along: Following tradition of Criminal Minds, there's a dead girl who is seen as alive by the UnSub in "Devotion". Until the reveal, she's played by an actress, talks and moves.
- Dramatic Pause: Coop is a... fan of these.
- Face Stealer: In "The Girl in the Blue Mask", a father is trying to repair his daughter's (not actually) disfigured face by stealing the facial skin of others.
- Fair Cop: Considering that the two female agents are Beau Garrett (Gina) and Janeane Garofalo (Beth), this trope is definitely in play. On the male side, we have Matt Ryan (Mick), and Michael Kelly (Prophet) has to do something for somebody.
- For the Evulz: The killer in "Jane" outright claims he had no reason to torture and kill women, he just did it. According to Coop, he's telling the truth; to the killer, people and most things are just indistinguishable blurs, and he is incapable of anything even resembling emotion, including both (sadistic) joy or happiness, even while torture-murdering.
- Freudian Excuse:
- The unsub in "Lonely Heart" is so easily manipulated by Marcus because her uncle used to molest her. It's also implied that Marcus' hatred of women may stem from his mother.
- In "Smother", the unsub hates women and has a fixation on the breasts because his mother molested him throughout childhood and kept breastfeeding him past the normal age.
- "Death by a Thousand Cuts": Richard Stahl watched his family get murdered as a kid and constantly blames himself, leading him to develop into a sadomasochist obsessed with the ways he can punish himself. It also made him an easier target to manipulate for the real villain of the episode.
- Heel–Face Turn: The serial killer in "The Time is Now" turns out to be genuinely repentant, and only kept calling for a new trial because she believed it was the only way she could be cleared of the murder of her mother, which was wrongly attributed to her. When she actually is released due to new evidence that was previously suppressed, her first act is to apologize and confess to the daughter of two of her victims, then turn herself in.
- I Have Your Wife: How the killer in "Death by a Thousand Cuts" coerces people into committing murder.
- I Just Want to Be Loved: Said by the killer in "Two of a Kind", during his Villainous Breakdown.
- Karma Houdini: The vengeful father in "Nighthawk". Despite harassing the unsub and his wife for years with threatening phone calls, acts of vandalism, violating the restraining order put up against him, and murdering their cat, it doesn't seem like he'll face any repercussions for it.
- Left Hanging: The series finale ends with either Beth being killed by an unsub or Cooper being forced to kill an unsub, but the screen goes black with a gunshot going off, leaving it up to interpretation which person died. The initial plan was likely to pick up where they left off in Season 2, but since the series was cancelled, there's no conclusion.
- Loved I Not Honor More: A (mostly) platonic version. When Beth is held hostage to force Cooper to choose between murdering the accomplice or letting her die, she flat-out tells the kidnapper to shoot her, because Cooper won't commit murder for her and she wouldn't want him to.
- Mad Bomber: "Here is the Fire" features a personal-cause bomber who is driven by grief and religious beliefs to blow up his three sons while also maximizing collateral damage due to believing they're all better off in Heaven.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: In the first episode, a white girl's abduction receives tons of coverage, while the earlier abductions of three black girls gain minimal attention and go cold quickly. They only manage to recover the white girl because they work the case of the black girls, who were the real targets.
- Monkey Morality Pose: The attacks (Eye Scream, Ear Ache and attempted Tongue Trauma) in "See No Evil" correspond to this.
- Monster Fangirl: Despite murdering three girls, the imprisoned killer in "Lonely Heart" has a lot of these. One of which, he has brainwashed into killing for him.
- Mysterious Past: Cooper, whose past seems convoluted and complex but never explained, only the occasional hint is dropped.
- "No. Just… No" Reaction: Essentially Mick's reaction to the suggestion that the killer in "Devotion" is a necrophiliac.
- No Name Given: The titular victim in "Jane" (short for "Jane Doe"), and the killer himself.
- Many other victims throughout the series also get this treatment.
- Offing the Offspring: The bomber in "Here is the Fire" intended to kill his three sons, and the bulk of his community's children.
- Only Six Faces: What everyone looks like to the killer in "Jane", who has a mental disorder. While he could tell the difference between, say, his mother, his teacher, and a random woman on the street there's no emotional connection.
- Parting-Words Regret: The mother of one of the victims in "Nighthawk" regrets that her last conversation with her son was an argument.
- Powerful Pick: A victim gets an ice pick jammed into her ear in "See No Evil".
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Red Cell has shades of this: a Military Brat with father issues, a British ex-special-forces sniper, an ex-con who really can't stand child molesters, and a woman who has been kicked off multiple anti-terrorism teams for personality conflicts, all led by a rather Zen Catholic priest with a Mysterious Past and ties to a lot of people. They are based out of the back of a gym and are fairly casual about dress code and professional behavior.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: FBI Director Jack Fickler. Which so far contrasts with the BAU's Erin Strauss.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Cooper likes giving these to particularly heinous unsubs. Beth also gives one to a convicted serial killer in "Lonely Heart".Cooper: (to the unsub in "See No Evil") You've saved no one. You've saved nothing. You just wanted to feel needed and the needy are all around you, but you couldn't see them. You're the one who couldn't see. You're the one who couldn't hear. You're the one whose words were false. You just wanted to feel recognized. And now you'll be recognized. You'll be remembered, not as a champion, not as an angel, but as an empty, heartless woman who tried to play God.
- Recurring Extra: The gym janitor, who was never given a name, and only spoke once.
- Relative Error: When she catches Mick talking affectionately over the phone to a girl named "Jenna", Beth assumes it's his girlfriend and promptly heckles him. She later finds out that Jenna is his little sister.
- Replacement Goldfish: The killer in "Two of a Kind" abducts little black girls who remind him of his daughter, who he killed in a fit of rage.
- Retcon: The Red Cell team concept was not present in the pilot. Sam and Hotch were the same rank, just leading different teams. This show shows that Sam does not answer to Strauss at all (only answering to the actual director of the FBI, Jack Fickler).
- Sadistic Choice: One UnSub threatens to kill Beth unless Cooper kills their accomplice in cold blood. To make it even harder for Cooper, the accomplice is suicidal and begging him to do it, there are no witnesses, and the hostage-taker has always released the hostage unharmed if their loved one kills for them.
- Serial Killer:
- "Two of a Kind": Davis Scolfield is a father that murdered his daughter and attempts to replace her by kidnapping girls that remind him of her. Unfortunately, he's too mentally unhinged, so when the girls don't accept his attempts to win their love, he kills them.
- "Lonely Heart": Marcus Lee Graham and Rachel Lancroft are a pair of serial killers, with Marcus being the dominant and Rachel being the submissive. Marcus started out independently by stabbing girls and watching them bleed to death, eventually being caught after murdering three girls and attacking one other. Rachel was a girl he met on an online dating site who soon became his lawyer. Marcus brainwashed her to start murdering men with the same MO.
- "See No Evil": Margaret McKenna, a nurse with Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy worked at several hospitals where she tried to get recognition by speaking out against outbreaks of staph infections that she caused. When her latest attempt results in the death of a patient, her being ignored again, and the hospital settling a lawsuit with the patient's wife, Margaret starts killing and sending Monkey Morality Pose-style messages in a last attempt to make people listen to her.
- "One Shot Kill": Jason Wheeler is a homegrown Cold Sniper taught by his veteran father. After sniping a kid who he went to school with in his teenage years, he murders his father in a fit of rage as an adult and a month later starts practicing sniping random people to prepare for a massacre of all of his dad's old army buddies at his memorial service.
- "Jane": The nameless unsub abducts women, dismembers them alive with a bandsaw, puts their body parts into steel drums, fills them with wet cement, and dumps them into a lake. Initially starting out with prostitutes, a vice sweep led him to switching to middle-class women. Claiming three victims before the episode, he abducts his fourth and murders a good Samaritan that tries to intervene in the Cold Open.
- "Nighthawk": The unsub's son, Matthew Keane murdered and dismembered five people in between 2006 and 2007 for unknown reasons.
- "Smother": Trevor Norris is an angry teenage boy that abducts and kills mothers as surrogates for his own who sexually abused him throughout his childhood and controlled most of his life.
- "The Time is Now": Veronica Day is one by proxy, as her MO was convincing teenage boys to shoot their parents with a shotgun and write the episode's title on the wall in their blood. She did this three times before she was finally caught when the last accomplice didn't want to kill his little sister.
- "Strays": Clark Earle Page is a sadistic deranged killer working with a local sex trafficker to abduct women and auction them off. The trafficker provides Page with girls to brutalize and kill to his liking, while Page helps bring in and prepare new girls to be sold. By the time of the episode, he's killed four women in the span of six months.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Beth is missing from most promo material.
- Slashed Throat: Happens to a would-be good Samaritan in "Jane" when he spots the killer abducting his latest victim.
- Sniper Duel: Between Mick and the UnSub in "One Shot Kill".
- Spin-Off: This series is a type 3 spin-off of Criminal Minds.
- Sympathetic Murderer: The UnSub of "Devotion" is schizophrenic, thinks his sister's corpse is alive and is trying to get her justice from their dad putting them in foster homes.
- Leonard Keane in "Nighthawk" was a loving and innocent father who was demonized and harassed for years because people blamed him for his son becoming a serial killer, with the harassment escalating to vandalism and the murder of his cat. His wife had a nervous breakdown because of the harassment rendering her catatonic and despite filing a restraining order against one of the perpetrators, the legal fees bankrupted Leonard, leaving him unable to continue paying for his wife's medical bills. All of this, combined with complex feelings of guilt, people at his work treating him like a monster, and being fired by his unsympathetic boss are why he snaps.
- Then Let Me Be Evil: The UnSub in "Nighthawk". His and his wife's lives were destroyed by ostracism for having a Serial Killer son, despite the parents themselves being innocent and oblivious. Inevitably, the man snapped and went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, spitefully declaring that he's just giving their harassers what they expect from his family.
- Turn in Your Badge: Played with. Fickler makes it seem like he's firing Prophet, but he's actually taking him off probational status and making him a full agent. But the rest of the team doesn't know that, nor does the audience.
- Two-Faced: Two of the victims in "The Girl in the Blue Mask" are left like this, though only one survives.
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Mick and Gina; possibly Sam and Beth.
- The Vamp: The killer in "The Time is Now" manipulates teenage boys into killing their parents. While it's never explicitly stated that she uses sex to do so, it's highly probable.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The son of the killer from Nighthawk was obviously based on Jeffrey Dahmer.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Pick any two team members, but especially Mick and Prophet, Mick and Beth, and Beth and Coop.
- Whole-Plot Reference: "The Girl in the Blue Mask" is CM: SB's take on Eyes Without a Face.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Quite a few, but the father in "Here Is the Fire" takes the cake. After his wife's death, he hides pipe bombs in his sons' back packs and sends them off to school, a field trip, and the hospital where his wife died. Only the middle son's goes off, but he's the one who went to school... He becomes less sympathetic when it's indicated that he never intended to die himself, and probably would've started his life anew after disposing of the remnants of his old one, plus tons of other random people.
- You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!:
- The killer in "Two of a Kind" killed his daughter in a fit of rage.
- The killer in "The Girl in the Blue Mask" temporarily disfigured his daughter by pressing her face against a hot surface while drunk.
