Discovery Channel joins the scripted true-crime craze with the two-hour premiere of its anthology series Manhunt: Unabomber (Tuesday, Aug. 1, at 9pm ET/PT). This eight-episode limited series retraces the desperate hunt to identify and catch the individual profiled in the most famous police sketch in the world — the serial killer dubbed the Unabomber.
During the Unabomber’s reign of terror, which stretched from 1978-96, he mailed or hand-delivered package bombs to a seemingly random collection of universities, airlines, technology stores, lobbyists and others, killing three people and injuring dozens more. And when he released his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” he bemoaned humanity’s loss of autonomy, urged nature-based anarchism and rationalized his use of bombings as calling attention to man’s dependence on technology.
Sam Worthington (Avatar) stars as FBI profiler Jim Fitzgerald, who joined the UNABOM task force in 1995. Handed a wildly inaccurate profile of the suspect, Fitzgerald used pioneering and highly controversial forensic linguistics to create an uncanny profile of the Unabomber, later identified as Ted Kaczynski (played by Paul Bettany, Transcendence), a Harvard-educated former math professor turned survivalist, who was arrested at his rural Montana cabin.
For much of the series’ first episode, Kaczynski is only seen in bits and pieces: a shot of hands here, a face in profile there. When we finally see the insane genius full in the face, he and Fitzgerald are meeting for the first time. The men contemplate each other less as adversaries and more as kindred spirits who share an unlikely understanding. It’s a mesmerizing moment, and Bettany as Kaczynski makes as chilling a murderer as Anthony Hopkins did as Hannibal Lecter.
Manhunt: Unabomber — which also stars Chris Noth, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Jane Lynch, Mark Duplass, Michael Nouri, Brian d’Arcy James and Elizabeth Reaser — isn’t trying to paint a compassionate picture of Kaczynski. He is clearly portrayed as a murderer and a terrorist. What it does delve into is the effect of his words and how they affected Fitzgerald, who seemingly suffered a mental breakdown as a result of uncovering the clues to Kaczynski’s psyche that were found within his manifesto and other letters he sent. Interestingly, Fitzgerald serves as a consulting producer on the series, which weighs the insanity vs. intellect of one of America’s most notorious criminals.
You can stream the entire first hour of the series here:
