By Murtz Jaffer
It’s hard to believe that the one-time star of Dharma & Greg is now the best-known profiler on Criminal Minds, but that’s exactly the case for Thomas Gibson.
I caught up with TV’s “Aaron Hotchner” to discuss his character, the success of the show, and why television audiences like to be scared.
I want to start by asking you about the character of Aaron Hotchner, do you think he’s finally in the category of iconic crime fighter like Fox Mulder or Andy Sipowicz?
Wow, when you say ‘iconic crimefighter’ I gotta go with Kojak and Columbo. I don’t know. That’s certainly not up to me. It’s certainly a nice idea to have had him been around long enough to consider it.
Will we ever find out more about his backstory and why he joined the agency?
I think one of the most interesting questions about the job and about the people who really do the job and us who play them on TV is what exactly got them from point A to point B. It’s not as interesting to give a full drawing of where it came from. It’s much more interesting to put it together on your own or at least put certain pieces of the puzzle together on your own and you have got these spaces in the middle where you don’t quite know.
How do the writers come up with the storylines? Do they just research all these killers or are they just twisted people themselves?
[Laughs] I don’t think that they are necessarily twisted people but I think that they have done all of their research on these twisted cases and criminals and I think you can’t help but be affected by it. I think all of our stories do germinate in some sort of real case. And then of course, elements of it get excised for many reasons and all these other elements get added to them for the sake of dramatic license.
With shows like yours and American Horror Story increasing in popularity, do you think viewers have just embraced the fact that they like seeing evil on TV and being scared? Have we moved past cookie cutter sitcoms like dare I say it, Dharma & Greg?
I take exception to the analogy to the cookie-cutter sitcom analogy with Dharma & Greg! I am just kidding, obviously. I think these shows and these trends are cyclical. A couple of my favourite shows when I was a kid were The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and to me those were really scary. They certainly fell out of favour for a while as did the cop show and the medical show and the sitcom. I think any formula or any kind of cookie-cutter type genre can be revived with good writing.
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