TELEVISION / TV Boyfriend: Evolution / Katie Darby Mullins
Image © CBS | Paramount Plus
“One life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.” — Albert Camus, The Stranger
This story starts with a chihuahua named Pablo.
No. I’ll go back further. Criminal Minds is a television procedural that started in 2005, which is when I first fell in love with my TV boyfriend (Dr. Spencer Reid: you can read about him in the longer-but-less gritty original essay I wrote about our completely fictional relationship for Drunk Monkeys). I had a hard time saying goodbye to him when the series wrapped in 2020, but I swore I’d never go back and re-watch. I’d watched it, I’d loved it, and I would let it live in the starry-eyed nostalgia that our favorite stories are elevated to: I was afraid it would be, as I’d told people so many times, “a silly TV show.” (I never meant it, but I said it often.) Instead of inviting conversation, I did what I always do when I need to answer questions about myself: I started writing about it. I needed to uncover why I loved a fictional person so much.
I won’t lie. The breakup (series finale) was hard. But my husband Andy was supportive when he came in and saw me sobbing at the end of the last episode while they played David Bowie’s “Heroes,” and the characters I loved so much finally got to just dance and sing and enjoy each other’s company. The Bowie thing was particularly meaningful: after I had my stroke in January of 2017, David Bowie had become a bit of a North Star. A lot of a North Star. OK, I have several Bowie tattoos and one of my more recent classes took me to see Moonage Daydream. It felt like that moment was just for me: “Here, Katie. You enjoy this.” It’s like when you’re at a concert and you swear the lead singer is pointing directly at you, and your friends are good-natured enough to use a serious tone when they agree.
Criminal Minds: Evolution also starts in 2005. Not literally. The first scene is in 2005. It started airing at the end of 2022, which means it was perfect timing for me to watch a new Criminal Minds with my dog, alone, exactly the way I had watched the first fifteen years. Whether it was rational or not, though, instead of watching the new show, I decided to re-watch the original series.
Because Pablo was sick.
I hope I don’t have to explain that logic goes out the window when faced with grief, and you can just decide to understand that I wanted to spend potentially the worst winter of my adult life with my best friend Pablo nuzzled on my lap, hoping that I could keep him alive through fifteen seasons of crime. The plan was this magical thinking might save his life. The plan was he saved me once, after my stroke, watching these shows with me as they aired on Wednesday night. I was never going to watch the show again because it was frozen in time as a good memory, a thing I shared with my mom, a show I adored privately because I was afraid publicly, people might criticize it, and I couldn’t handle it. But privately—with Pablo. For twelve years, everything has been “with Pablo.”
So Pablo got sick, and I needed a time machine and a miracle. Dr. Spencer Reid, take me away.
I’m not being euphemistic or intentionally vague about Pablo’s illness, by the way: he was just “normal” one day and then he wasn’t. He went from having occasional seizures to regular ones so slowly, I didn’t even notice that I was predicting them. The milky-white stain behind his once-dark eyes was starting to feel a little more pronounced, and he looked lost a little more often. One night I went to the bathroom at three in the morning and he followed me in, looked concerned, and then peed all over the bathroom floor. I thought he was sleepy. It was funny. Then he stopped eating. My mom sent up an absorbent blanket for geriatric, incontinent dogs so I could move him from place to place with me, alternately holding him close and whispering, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” and weeping. The vet said that he definitely had a kidney infection and at least one abscessed tooth, but it would be January before we could get him into dental surgery and see what else he needed. I was hoping there was enough Criminal Minds to fill the space of winter break, between the last week of November and the first available appointment, so that neither he nor I needed to think about anything else.
One night, I was finishing an episode when my husband Andy got home. He said, “No, go ahead, finish.” He’d been the one to coin the term “TV boyfriend,” and he’d always let Criminal Minds stay a place in my head, something I’d carried with me from before he existed in my life. But he said, “It’s not like I’ve never watched an episode,” and all the sudden I realized, sure: it’s pretty silly for me to be protective about a television show. He could watch a few minutes.
I don’t know how many hours we watched that night, but it was not just one episode. I’d say, “One more OK?”
Andy always says, “It’s up to you, but I could do one more,” and secretly, I always want to do one more: it’s like a sleepover. I hate the part of the day where it ends, where Pablo goes to his bed and I go to mine and Andy is asleep. One more. One more.
***
As we’re watching it now, the heat has gone out in the house. It’s February. We’ve moved the dogs and a space heater into the bedroom and we’re hunkering down. I wouldn’t recommend no heat in Indiana during the winter, but I wasn’t sure Pablo would still be magically snoring under my arm this late in the year, so I’m relieved. His gentle whuffles seem almost magic now.
Have I ever told you that one time, he spit on someone? I’m not joking. It took him about two minutes. He was in my arm, rocking back and forth, making the strangest hawking noise. Finally, he expelled something like spit, and it landed on the person I was talking to.
“Did he just spit on me?” she asked.
Only because I’m not brave enough to, I thought. “I . . . think so . . .” I admitted.
“Can dogs even spit?” she asked, wiping her expensive blouse. I was in pajamas.
I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. I didn’t think so, but there was no question as to what had just happened in front of us. “Apparently?” I waited for her to leave and gave him a treat.
I shouldn’t encourage bad behavior in my dogs, I know, but—well, if he can spit, and he wants to spit, I feel like he should be able to spit. That’s sort of my approach to a three-pound creature. “He won’t live forever,” I sometimes said before handing him some steak or hot dog. I’ll admit it. He gets scraps. Or at least he very much did, before.
It’s only been three years since my TV boyfriend and I broke up, but three years is long enough for a dog to become an elderly dog while you’re not looking. It’s been an eventful three years for all of us: my husband has transitioned into an IT job. Grace is a senior in high school. I’m off my cane and I’m a runner now, which isn’t a joke, even though it sounds like one. I went blonde. Pablo is old, and a few months ago, he was dying.
I’d forgotten how much death Reid is surrounded by on the original series, though I did tell Andy when he started watching, “If Reid loves someone, don’t get attached.” So many of my students who’ve watched immediately yell, “MAEVE!” when I tell them I warned him, but it’s sort of mind-blowing how many people he loves die. When you’re slamming hours and hours of Criminal Minds back to back, it feels almost cruel: his mentors, his girlfriend, his schizophrenic mother who doesn’t die, but absolutely suffers—it’s just so much. Toward the end of the series, they give him a break, and his mom, Diana (Jane Lynch) enters a brief period of lucidity.
She’s dealing with Alzheimer’s on top of the schizophrenia by this point, so the lucidity is shocking, but it’s not unheard of: sometimes it happens right before the down slide in those kinds of illnesses. But for just one episode, we get to see the “Mom” that actually raised Reid, the caring, loving Diana, the person he wants to take care of. Despite being a genius who is aware of how those illnesses work, he immediately starts talking about medication and trials and ways to keep her healthy. She doesn’t want to do that and says they should enjoy the moment they have.
It doesn’t matter that he’s a genius. You can’t out-think emotion. He storms off.
When he comes back, he admits something to her: I don’t know who I am if I’m not your son.
What am I if I’m not Pablo’s dog mommy? That sounds silly. (“It’s just a silly show, I don’t know why I care so much,” I said any time the series made me cry.) But the trick of being a college professor and a stepmother is this: there are not a lot of constants in your life. The students I wrote about in the last essay? They’ve all moved on. One is a pastor now. One finished their PhD. One is pregnant. They’re adults, and they are far away from me. I miss them, but that’s what they’re supposed to do. Grace, who I love with all my heart, has spent every other weekend away from me since I’ve known her. She’s moving to college in August, and I know that’s going to be a transition that hurts in ways I can’t predict—but I also know how the house sounds without her in it.
I don’t know how the house sounds without Pablo’s claws clicking against the hardwood floor.
I wrote a lot about invisibility in my last essay. But Pablo always sees me. So much of the great curse of my life is that I get to love people and things very deeply, but in an attempt to make sure that they are ready to leave me. Not Pablo.
You know something frustrating that’s silly? The end of the episode (“Awakenings”) shows Reid and his mom having a ‘normal’ moment for them and setting up a game of chess. At the beginning and end of each episode, there’s a quotation, and on that one, it’s A.A. Milne’s “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
“Dammit!” I shouted. Pablo startled, but not much. He’s used to big reactions from me. Andy looked confused for a moment, and I realized, no one but me would know why that was frustrating. “Umm. I wrote an essay about Criminal Minds, and I wrote it before the series wrapped up—I actually ended it with that quotation,” I said.
Andy laughed. “You should start the one you’re working on by saying, ‘I used it first!’”
I thought about that. But this is an essay about Pablo being sick. TV is what I used to try and forget about that for a while.
Did I ever tell the story of how I watched so much Criminal Minds, that once, someone said something sociopathically careless in front of me and my family, and while I held Pablo, without missing a beat, I said, “Assemble the team, we’re ready to give the profile”? I can’t imagine I did. It doesn’t make me look good.
I imagine Pablo would have given me a treat, had he been able.
***
It’s January now. Let’s go back to the surgery. I was terrified to even have the dental cleaning done, because anesthesia on a dog who can’t eat or really even move seems dangerous. I trust my vet, though, and I can see that something needs to be done. I kiss him and hug him and take a million pictures ‘in case,’ but I can’t look at those pictures now, because I can see how puffy my face is. (There is another picture of Pablo I cannot look at: Andy brought him to visit me at the rehabilitation center after my stroke. I don’t know how to process the girl in the image, but I know she is me, and I can’t really connect with her. I’m sure one day, though, I’ll want that picture, too.)
When they called to tell me he made it through the surgery, but he was having a hard time waking up, I had a high-grade anxiety the rest of the day. By now, you know he makes it to February, so you don’t have to live with the same anxiety I did: they did, however, tell me they had to remove all of his teeth.
All of his teeth. All of them. He is defanged. He is harmless. His gums make a noise when he yawns. (It is precious. I won’t be taking questions.)
The thing is, I had a bunch of teeth break recently. I have Ehler’s-Danlos, and breaking bones is just part of it. So I’ve had these gaps where I’m waiting to get the implants put in—
Never mind. Forget it. I don’t want to think about being toothless. Let’s talk about the night after the surgery.
Pablo was wrapped, nearly motionless, in a blanket on my lap, and Andy kept reaching over to pet him. “I was so worried,” he kept saying, and all I could think was how grateful I was that he showed that by watching my show with me and letting me be anxious. How ridiculously beautiful is it that, despite his own worries for Pablo, he just let me determine what our coping mechanism would be?
Anyway, that was the night Andy laughed after Reid said, “Well, actually—” and said, “Oh, wow. I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Reid isn’t your TV Boyfriend. Reid is who you wanted to BE.” Then he laughed again and said, “Oh no. Does this mean Reid is my TV Boyfriend?”
The moment felt revelatory for me. Of course! I’m not vain enough to think I’m as smart as Reid, but in that moment, something clicked, and I learned something new about myself.
While I was writing this essay, though? The one you’re reading? I went back to the first one. You know. Like I did with the TV show? And I found a few things. First, this line—
There are a few weird things about writing any kind of personal essay, but most surprising to me every time is how I often already know something about myself that I’m not ready to know yet. In my last essay about Criminal Minds, I wrote, “It was like looking in an aspirational mirror. I was in love with the idea that there could be someone out there like him: someone for whom those hours studying weren’t wasted. I was in love with the idea that I could be someone like him.” How did I miss that?
—means that what I learned from Andy, I’d already learned once before, forgotten, and rediscovered. How strange is that? That I didn’t know myself, I learned myself through writing an essay, I forgot myself, and my husband—my real TV Boyfriend, the man who watches TV with me—found me again.
My mother-in-law, Jill, once told me, “We don’t process things once: we process them first at the time of impact, and again when our understanding of the world shifts, and again when our maturity level changes, and again once we have a kid or families—” and at the time, that was the scariest thing she could have told me. I was thinking about Grace. Any trauma she had was going to spiral and echo out through the rest of her life, and she was going to experience it again and again and again, but all at different levels of impact. I hadn’t thought yet about what that meant for things that aren’t traumatic. Self-discovery happens, but then you get busy. There’s a pandemic, so you move to Zoom. You take for granted that Pablo has been there forever and will always be there, by your side, on your lap. Sometimes you turn your Zoom screen off to cry. And then you learn something new about yourself.
It’s just sometimes, when you’ve written it down, there’s a public record of the fact that it’s not a new discovery.
I bet Spencer would have a word or some kind of theory that explains this. But Spencer’s not around anymore, even though Criminal Minds is back. In fact, it’s called Criminal Minds: Evolution, and I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m trying to do, here. I’m trying to become the person who will be able to say goodbye to Pablo when it’s time. And it’s not time yet! It’s not. Because he’s still happy, and now he’s running circles and playing and eating. He’s still incontinent, but the seizures have slowed down.
But I had a really hard time saying goodbye to a television show. What am I going to do when it’s the most constant in-person friend I have?
***
Criminal Minds: Evolution is a new, capsule season that was created for Paramount Plus. It’s a darker show; there are so many things that they weren’t able to do on network (Joe-Montagna-as-Rossi’s first, emphatic, “Shit!” as he realized he forgot his badge and gun felt like an epithet the character had been dancing around since he was brought in to replace Mandy Patinkin’s Gideon). I thought this would likely weaken my resolve to watch the show, maybe eliminating it all together. Maybe I wouldn’t get roped in this time. There’s no Reid, what’s in it for me?
Pablo. Pablo is still here, and I am out of episodes with Reid in them. So into the darkness we plunged.
For what it’s worth, if you’re on the fence, you should watch it. It’s clever, and interesting, and it is really fun to hear the characters have genuine reactions to some of the awful things they’re seeing. But when we finished the show, Andy and I talked about it for some time—the way the writers dealt with not having certain characters, the way an over-arching criminal tied everything together, what worked best. But Andy said it best.
“This is probably too big a topic to get into right now,” he started as we turned off the light. I love when he does that. It makes me think he doesn’t want the sleepover to end, either. “But Reid’s absence was felt and mentioned and profound, but they didn’t bother to try to replace him. He was irreplaceable. Instead, they showed what happened when the character that everyone else on the team loved and wanted to protect goes away.”
Andy’s right, of course. Reid is the character that the whole team loved and had a soft spot for. By taking away the character who was the keeper of everyone’s secrets, the godfather to every child, the beating heart of so many scenes—they showed his growth, too. He was defined by every moment you could see the team closing off from each other, every moment they needed to talk to or love someone and he wasn’t there to listen or receive. His gentle hope being gone changed everyone and made them all more angular, all a little more tired.
One time, Andy said that he was glad we had Pablo because if we didn’t, he didn’t know what I would do with all the love I give him. I don’t know what I’ll do with it either, though now it’s a much more urgent matter than it was when he observed it. I know I need to just treasure these moments. I should pay attention to Diana: just enjoy the zoomies he’s running now. Laugh when he makes that silly sound when he yawns. Clean up the pee without being frustrated. Spend extra for the Farmer’s Dog food. Know that despite everything, this too shall pass.
And when he’s gone, who will I be?
I bet you’re thinking he’s just a dog. But he’s a hell of a lot more real than a TV boyfriend, and I didn’t do well losing him, either.
***
I told you I needed a time machine. Isn’t this confusing? How the whole story starts in 2005, for me and my TV boyfriend, I got married in 2010, I got Pablo in 2011, and I had a stroke in 2017. The show ended in 2020. The new season takes place post-Covid in 2023. I am, quite literally, even physically, a different person than I was when I wrote the first essay. So is Pablo. We have had inverse reactions to aging: I’ve gotten stronger. He is an old chihuahua.
The thing about re-watching Criminal Minds and then journeying into today with them on the Evolution series is, sure, it was just a coping mechanism. Then it was a way to re-learn myself. But by the end, it was something I shared with Pablo, but also with Andy. My TV boyfriends are, regrettably, not Spencer Reid, but my husband and my dog. And while it might seem like a waste of time to spend so many hours in front of the television, when I tell you how many of them were spent with Pablo softly sighing, Andy and me guessing the next plot twist, and us laughing about something unrelated, it actually becomes something transcendent. It’s a new part of the internal language of our marriage. In the first essay, I explained why Andy let me watch it alone:
Andy understands that there is a younger part of me that is locked into this character, something naïve and almost smart enough to understand how big the world is, but not quite aware yet of how much of it I’ll never fully comprehend. He doesn’t watch it with me: he allows me to enjoy the world that doesn’t exist, even if it also throws a weird, true shadow in our universe.
That was a gift. There was a time where I needed to have a universe unshared, something where the fiction was allowed to be real for me, so I could love and love and love and never have anyone question it. But we are in a place and time, now, where a creature I have poured all of my love into for the last twelve years of my life is at a crossroads, and I know our time is limited. Andy gently asked to be invited into the universe I was sharing with Pablo, and now . . . well, I won’t lie. I thought I’d find the show less brilliant than I thought it was the first time, because I was young, and I thought I was in love with Spencer Reid—but that’s not what happened. It winds up, I love the show even more. I actually think it’s more clever than I sometimes gave it credit for. But I get to know that because Andy was there to witness and enjoy with me, to discuss and dissect.
Pablo’s still OK. You’re like me, I imagine, and the idea that the dog doesn’t pull through must be tugging at you. But we’re OK. He’s hanging in. I keep seeing Matthew Gray Gubler (yes, I know there’s an actor behind Reid; no, I don’t generally like to acknowledge it) tear up with Jane Lynch, telling her that he doesn’t know who he is if she’s not around, and I feel—I feel defanged. I feel toothless. I feel helpless.
But then I remember what happened next. She tells him, “You’ll figure it out.”
At least Reid and I both had the opportunity to hold our beloveds and say, “I don’t know how to do this.” They both responded in only love. And one day, we’re both going to have to move forward. I’m not looking forward to it, by any means, but I’m grateful, now, to have Criminal Minds as a touchstone of all the hours we spent together, and to have a new shared language with Andy, who I know will miss Pablo as much as I do, even if he comforts me as I mourn out loud.
Somewhat hilariously, Pablo has not noticed anything is wrong. He sits, he eats, he sleeps, he loves.
“Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” — Mitch Albom
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her poetry book “Me & Phil” is forthcoming at Kelsay Books.