The American public, on the other hand, couldn't have disagreed more and turned the show into a Top-10 hit with almost 16 million people tuning in each week. This season, the series even passed cultural phenomenon Lost as Wednesday night's prime-time king. To further the momentum, CBS awarded Criminal Minds the cherished post-Super Bowl XLI slot—a move that will almost assuredly boost ratings even more.

Critics hate it. Viewers love it. And it's obvious who the network is more concerned about. While that's nothing new for television, it does beg the question: Just what is it that's setting this series apart from all the other murder-mayhem on TV these days?

Casting a Dark Shadow
It could be the show's scattergun approach. Special Agents Aaron Hotchner (played by Thomas Gibson of Dharma & Greg fame) and Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin) lead a well-rounded team of elite FBI profilers formally known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit. These guys don't just sit around in a room all day trying to second-guess the next move of a masterminding psycho-killer. Each team member brings a unique area of expertise ranging from sex offenders to obsessional crimes to psychoanalysis. Add it all up and you're heading into different territory every episode. One week a case is cracked by the resident twentysomething genius through sheer mathematics, à la Numb3rs; the next it's CSI-, Cold Case- or Without a Trace-like antics that come to the rescue.

Make no mistake, though, Criminal Minds has more than a few common threads running through it. One is that these investigators detest the damage and pain inflicted by unsubs (unknown subjects). But overshadowing that positive bring-the-bad-guy-to-justice instinct is how extremely dark and sadistic these stories have been. A serial killer caged his young, attractive female victims before raping and murdering them, for instance. A child abductor auctioned off a 6-year-old boy in an online pedophile ring. A bank robber forced his captives to undress and simulate sex acts in front of the group. A deranged father kept his own daughter chained to a bed in a dungeon. And after the Super Bowl, a Bible-abusing hacker recorded himself brutally murdering "sinners," and then posted his snuff films online.

Not every Ted Bundy-in-the-making has been an adult, either. A teenager on the verge of a mental breakdown fantasized about hacking away at prostitutes while having sex with them. A small-town elementary student hunted down his peers in a forest, then beat them to a pulp with a baseball bat. And so it's gone in the past. And so it goes each week. ...

Show, Don't Tell
This is sick, truly disturbing stuff. Yet possibly more troubling is that millions of us are opting to be entertained by such appalling stories and the accompanying gory visuals. The plotlines may be occasionally ripped from the headlines, but does that really justify tuning in?

"We never see any stabbings. We never see any stranglings," freshman producer and creator Jeff Davis declared when his show first hit prime time. And indeed, though it certainly included some disturbing images, his project actually did more suggesting than depicting. That didn't last long. By 2006's season finale, we'd already seen enough severed heads, blood-stained crime scenes and impaled victims to fill another Hannibal Lecter movie.

This season things have only gotten worse, with grisly shots of bludgeoned, partially-eaten corpses and graphic stabbing scenes proving that Davis and his crew have obviously had a change of heart. Maybe that's because they realized that as the blood level rose, so did ratings.

A Score for More Gore
We have to ask ourselves, then, if Criminal Minds would even exist if so many of us weren't tuning in to NCIS, Close to Home, Bones, and a whole array of CSI and Law & Order spin-offs? Television is and always has been a copycat industry. Make a hit and you'll find 20 clones clamoring for their shot at the big time. But without a hit, there are no clones. And without clones, there can't be a trend.

Ultimately, that means it's us, the viewers, who trigger the trends. With the click of a remote control, we have a say-so in deciding which shows last and which ones don't. Not too long ago, TV rode the sitcom wave all the way to its unofficial extinction. As Seinfeld and Friends took their last bows, audiences gradually discovered there wasn't much on the air to keep them laughing. (Really, how much of a "classic" is Two and a Half Men?) As a result, prime time grew fat with reality shows, game shows, procedurals, dramedies ... anything that could catch fire and ignite the next explosion.

That next explosion is what I'll call the Modern Forensics Era. And if viewers hope to see this swelling of graphic violence and gore fizzle anytime soon—or even if we're simply tired of the prime-time monotony—we won't just avert our eyes from seeing another mangled body, we'll stop watching entirely. (And it may even be worth our time to contact the networks and advertisers responsible and tell them we've stopped.)

Whether there's a Super Bowl tie-in or not, our entertainment does not have to stoop this low.