‘Mindhunter’ Season 2 Release Date Revealed

Fans will be delving back into the serial killer psyche in just a few weeks’ time, with Mindhunter Season 2 officially setting a premiere date. During an interview with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW’s The Treatment podcast, co-executive producer David Fincher announced that the Netflix original series about the early days of the FBI’s criminal profiling division will return for its sophomore run on Friday, Aug. 16. The date aligns with Charlize Theron’s statement in May that the upcoming season would drop in August.

Starring Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, the popular series had debuted on the streaming giant in August of 2017 and was quickly picked up for a second season just a month later.

Season 2 is set to pick up between 1979 and 1981 and will focus on the Atlanta Child Murders, the real-life crime in which 29 African-American children, adolescents, and adults were killed in the city of Atlanta between 1979 and 1981.

The season, according to Fincher, will pick up at the end of the investigation as the FBI is called in to Georgia to assist.

“[The FBI] are the last guys in, they’re trying to help out something that has its own momentum and politics,” he said. “It’s a divided battlefield. They’re coming in to throw this federal umbrella over everything to make everyone feel OK about sharing information.”

Wayne Bertram Williams was eventually convicted of two of the murders in 1982, though authorities believe that he was responsible for at least 23 of the 29 murders.

Williams will feature in the upcoming season alongside a number of other prolific serial killers, including Charles Manson and Manson family member Tex Watson, Elmer Wayne Henley (convicted for the Houston Mass Murders), David Berkowitz (Son of Sam/the .44 Caliber Killer), William Pierce Jr. (convicted of nine murders), William Henry Hance (The Stocking Strangler), and Paul Bateson (convicted of “The Bag Murders”).

While Season 1 had shown the process of developing the modern process of criminal profiling underwraps in the basement of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Season 2 will see the process transitioning to the public sphere.

“In the 70s, post-Manson, post-Son of Sam, post-Zodiac, there really was, I don’t think you can say it was an epidemic, but there was definitely the feeling that the notion of this has gotten away from us,” Fincher said. “There was this transition. I remember it happening with Son of Sam. When I left the Bay Area in the mid 1970s and our parents moved to Oregon, you go 300 miles north and nobody talked about Zodiac. It had been this festering thing that had never been brought to any kind of closure but no one cared about it [outside of the Bay Area]. Then Son of Sam came, and it was Newsweek and Time, the cover.”

Season 1 of Mindhunter is currently available for streaming. Season 2 will be available on Netflix on Friday, Aug. 16.