Even by TV procedural standards, Cross’ serial killer is beyond absurd

Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features spoilers for Cross’ first season. 

Contemporary popular culture is obsessed with serial killers—or rather, with a specific brand of serial killers. The meticulous ones. The organized ones. The ones who think of themselves as gods and plan and move through the world accordingly. These are the kind of serial killers that populate TV procedurals and page-turning paperbacks—or, as is the case in Cross, in TV procedurals based on page-turning paperbacks. And if you’ve made it to the end of that Prime Video adaptation of James Patterson’s famed D.C.-based Black detective, you’ll have found the limit case of that particular brand of killer. Indeed, “The Fanboy,” as Alex Cross (Aldis Hodge) and his team label their season-long villain, is a preposterous character, a figure beyond absurdity—even by TV procedural standards. 

The Fanboy, as his nickname indicates, is driven less by his own interests than the ones of those he admires. He would never call himself a copycat (for he’s not killing in the manner of his serial-killer inspirations) but his entire project is very much rooted in mimicry. Over the course of years, it seems, he’s been kidnapping men not just to kill them. He’s gone to great lengths, in fact, to sculpt them in the images of some of his idols, serial killers of yore whom he’s paying homage to, before murdering his victims in the same manner those killers were executed. For much of the season, The Fanboy is trying to pull off one last transformation and kill: turning young Shannon Witmer (Eloise Mumford) into Aileen Wuornos, the famed murderer who was executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002.

This being a television show, The Fanboy isn’t just painstakingly organizing these kills. He’s using them to create a masterpiece of sorts: a scrapbook where each victim’s transformation is chronicled with mugshot-like portraits, newspaper clippings, and even actual DNA from the OG murderers. It’s all quite elaborate and self-indulgent. Episode after episode, we hear him refer to himself as an artist. And, indeed, the more he works on Shannon to mold her in the shape of Aileen—which requires everything from burning her skin, dyeing her hair, and even destroying her teeth to better match Aileen’s crooked smile—one gets to witness someone who relishes every part of the process. At one point, he even compares himself to photographer Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee. The photojournalist was best known for his black and white street photography in which, as The Fanboy puts it, he often found traces of life amid the scenes of crime and death. 

To say The Fanboy is a needlessly pompous guy is to put it mildly. Which is by design since, as we find out soon enough in the season, the man behind those kills is Ed Ramsey (Ryan Eggold), a well-connected D.C. figure who seems to have everyone (from cops to politicians and everybody in between) under his thumb. Having come from nothing, Ramsey prides himself on being a moneyed member of the city’s high society, hosting parties that serve as networking events for folks he believes in (like, as it happens, Cross’ girlfriend, Elle [Samantha Walkes]). But of course that facade is all for show; his craven cruelty is fully on display when left alone to toy with Shannon and espouse his many ideas about what he thinks he’s creating with these outlandish kills. He’s a wounded, self-centered asshole who, if we are to believe Cross, can be equally charming and menacing, organized and yet quick to change gears, antisocial yet a consummate socialite. It’s all a bit much.

In Eggold’s hands, Ramsey/The Fanboy is a brilliant kind of lunatic, a beacon of wealth and privilege who sees other people as pawns in his own archly baroque plans. He’s the kind of guy who can blackmail cops, make key witnesses disappear, and escape accountability at every step of the way—all while thinking himself a righteous figure whose online followers (a bit of an undercooked subplot Cross never quite explores in depth) admire for…well, that seems unclear. The very idea of the “dark web” Cross imagines for Ramsey (often in a mask addressing those who tune into his livestreams) is rather murky and seems only populated by equally well-connected lawyers and plastic surgeons who help out Ramsey for no other reason than to feed their own egos.  

Which is all to say that his entire character and storyline (troubled kid who got into murder via a punk prank when he was young after allegedly making a sport of killing birds) is laughably preposterous. As is his lair, which feels so painstakingly art-directed that you’d think he was going to turn it into a gallery others could visit and gawk at. Where is he printing those giant mugshots? Where is he purchasing the tools needed to organize an execution by lethal injection? Who’s his interior decorator? Oh, and that’s before we get to his second lair, the wine cellar where he hires two guys to nab proof while his kidnapped victim is merely stuck in a drawer right there?! Seriously, sometimes Ramsey’s bravado makes for the show’s most incoherent moments. One need only to look at that birthday-party episode, which boggles the mind in the way it leans heavily into Ramsey being untouchable but also everyone around him being intentionally obtuse.

Cross insists on tying its story to contemporary themes. Cross often comes into contact with folks in the Black community who cannot fathom why or how he’d willingly be part of a system that so antagonizes the many men and women he grew up with. Against the backdrop of BLM and “Defund The Police” and “ACAB”—in D.C. of all places!—Cross initially sets up the death of a young Black man as the catalyst for the eventual hunt for The Fanboy. And throughout, Cross’ inability to prove Ramsey is the killer (let alone a believable suspect) is tied to notions of whiteness, privilege, wealth, and impunity (and how all make for a perfect cocktail if you happen to be a well-liked blond philanthropist who hobnobs with the chief of police in between pompously talking to your kidnapped victim, whom you’re mutilating and torturing in equal measure). 

Yet Ramsey’s motives and his M.O. are so absurd that those very real issues around what wealthy white men can get away with (often in broad daylight and with full-throated support from institutions clearly created to cushion their grasp on power) get bogged down whenever Cross has to snap back into a cat-and-mouse hunt between a spectacularly smart cop and a seemingly brilliant yet increasingly reckless killer who can’t imagine anyone would ever come close to catching him. Hubris, it seems, may well be the thing all TV serial killers have in common—well, that and their ability to elude the authorities, sometimes by the skin of their teeth, which Ramsey does too many times here for it to remain believable. 

With The Fanboy, Cross wants to tell a story about the allure of serial killers. Ramsey enjoys the control he has over his victims, and he savors the moments when he’s transforming them. He treats them like notches to be added to a budding collection that is, in the end, a paean to those killers who have come before. But in celebrating their deaths (their executions, in fact), The Fanboy feels like a fiction gone wrong: What is it about their ends that would cement The Fanboy as the ultimate chronicler of their achievements? That’s where the nickname feels all too well suited (even if it does irk Ramsey, who eventually doesn’t even get to claim the kills which were to make him famous). This is all fan fiction, too flimsy to match the real thing and often too self-indulgent in not understanding what worked in the original in the first place. It’s a barrage of lofty speeches and well-manicured scenes that never quite syncs with the serious tenor and subjects (like policing and impunity) that Cross is aiming for.