CBS isn't conservative or pro-Trump in any way in its news programming, but Hollywood Reporter TV critic Daniel Fienberg is accusing CBS of entertainment programming "perfectly tailored for the Trump era." The show is Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, a spinoff of the successful (and violent) FBI drama. Fienberg slammed it in a feature on the "Worst TV of 2016."
Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders towers below the rest because of how inevitable its awfulness was. Who'd have guessed that a show about Americans being terrorized overseas would be little more than xenophobia writ large? Anybody and everybody. Giving (shoddily produced) global scale to the Criminal Minds franchise's already nasty woman-in-peril trappings, Beyond Borders offers international paranoia so perfectly tailored for the Donald Trump era that I fully expect a season two episode in which the team goes to Russia and discovers that nobody has gone missing and everybody is safe and they all respect Putin's glorious achievements for 43 minutes.
Fienberg also hated its debut in a March 2016 review. The review's "bottom line" was blunt: "Xenophobic trash."
Moving on from the prevalent misogyny of the original Criminal Minds, CBS' new spinoff Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders is a pure distillation of xenophobia. A shameless combination of international b-roll and Trump Era paranoia, Beyond Borders stands as a compelling argument for building that wall around Mexico and not stopping until it contains and protects the entirety of our fragile, fragile nationhood.
He concluded it "may be perfectly timed to tap into the nativist rhetoric of the election cycle."
Fienberg hasn’t been alone. In May, Brian Lowry at Variety complained the show “opens with a voice-over that says 68 million Americans (a relatively small percentage, when you think about it) travel abroad, while offering that subset, as well as those who stay home, even more reason to be xenophobic and fearful.”
Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times also faulted the politics in the premise:
It's impossible, given the state of the American conversation about borders, not to wince at the timing. The crimes may be exotic enough to feel unlikely, but all the expository dialogue about vulnerable Americans and the wily non-Americans who stalk them is probably not what we need right at the moment.
Imagine the situation reversed — a show in which tourists to America were continually victimized in horrific ways — and you see the problem.
It's certainly impossible that a premise this hated by L.A. liberals would appear on TV without being a spinoff of a successful show.
