When I saw that Netflix planned a drama about serial-murder investigations executive-produced by David Fincher — the director of “Seven” and “Zodiac” — my gut reaction was: Stop, you’re killing me.

TV in the past several years has been obsessed with serial killers: “Dexter,” “Hannibal,” “The Following,” “The Fall,” “Aquarius,” Season 1 of “True Detective.” The criminal-genius trope has become an easy instant recipe — just add slaughter — for transgressive TV ambition. And Mr. Fincher’s “House of Cards,” also for Netflix, has not exactly been a model of subtlety.

But “Mindhunter,” whose first season appears Friday, is more academic than sensationalistic, at least in the two episodes made available to critics. Mr. Fincher may have shot one of cinema’s most famous head-in-a-box scenes, but “Mindhunter” thus far is more interested in the process of getting inside skulls than the process of removing them.

The drama begins in 1977, the year David Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam murders. Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), a hostage negotiator for the F.B.I., is growing troubled by a trend that he sees in the field: criminals whose actions are irrational, who therefore can’t be entreated with reason.