I just finished the season. It was mediocre. Bad at times, even. Which is sad because S1 was my favorite new show. It was well filmed and directed... it just forgot what it was too often.
They completely dropped Holden's homelife, which, as I said earlier, left him spinning around like The Good Doctor with everyone telling us how he needed to be kept on a short lease, while he didn't actually do anything crazy. Wendy's subplot was awful. You're telling me a zero chemistry relationship went nowhere? Shocker. Actually both her and Tench's subplots felt like they cut and paste the same conversation over and over again. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have Tensch's son do that so that we could experience all the stress of Tench's life falling apart should be fired.
Atlanta could have been good if they didn't keep hitting us with the race hammer. Endless. They literally turned a show about how the FBI learned to profile serial killers into a badly done propaganda piece on how bad racial profiling is... even when it catches the guy. Hey Holden, shouldn't you be chasing after some kkk people instead of bothering this nice serial killer? And worse, all this moralizing to the viewer just backfires, because everytime the STOP ladies or the hotel girlfriend rattle on about race, it just makes them look ignorant for not understanding serial killers rarely cross racial lines, no matter how many times Holden told them. The case itself was interesting enough, but the points they kept trying to hammer home didn't need to be said aloud every 5 minutes. show, don't tell.
The Manson interview was fantastic. They did both Manson and Tex well, and covered the two variant possibilities well, which i wasn't expecting [most just run with Bugliosi's Helter Skelter version]. As always, the interviews in general were the best part of the show. But then it was dropped. Just like the whole BTK plot. It was like they were halfway done writing the BTK season and netflix called up and was like, 'hey make sure you get some far right nazis and racism is bad stuff in there, ok? Kids loves that stuff.'
It still had the feel of Mindhunters, Fincher is a fantastic director, and the series has lots of room to grow, so hopefully s3 drops the moralizing and gets back to focusing on story. And by story i mean serial killers and profiling, not Tench refusing to move and Wendy inviting herself to baseball games.