There’s no doubt in my mind that a substantial amount of creative liberties were taken to make Mindhunter as compelling of a series at it could possibly be, but it’s the kernels of truth that are folded into the narrative that make it a flawless series nonetheless.
Throughout Mindhunter’s two-season run, Special Agent Holden Ford becomes obsessed with learning about the mind of the nations most notorious serial killers, and he does so by interviewing the likes of Edmund Kemper (brilliantly portrayed by Cameron Britton), Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), and David Berkowitz (Olive Cooper), to name a few. Whatever artistic license was used to create fictional analogs to the real-life Special Agents depicted in Mindhunter can be forgiven because the interviews that take place in each episode are lifted, nearly verbatim, from the actual real-life transcripts.