Murder Mindfully Forgot Why We Careeric

There is a light spoiler warning on this one, for both seasons of Murder Mindfully. If you have not watched it yet, the short version is: watch the first season, and go in with low expectations on the second.

I did not expect to like Murder Mindfully. A German black comedy about a burned-out mafia lawyer who discovers mindfulness and, somewhere between the breathing exercises, discovers murder, sounds like a premise that runs out of road in one episode. It did not. The first season, which landed on Netflix back in late 2024, was one of the more genuinely original things I watched all year, and originality is getting rare enough that I notice it now the way you notice silence.

Why the first season worked

The trick of season one is that the mindfulness is not a gimmick draped over a crime story. It is the engine of the crime story. Björn, the lawyer, is drowning: a marriage on the rocks, a monstrous client, a job that has eaten his life. He takes up mindfulness to fix his work-life balance, the most reasonable, middle-class thing a stressed professional can do. And then the show follows that logic, calmly and without blinking, all the way to its absurd conclusion. Be present. Do not carry yesterday's stress into today. Deal with the problem in front of you. When the problem in front of you happens to be a man in your boot, the same serene advice produces a corpse.

That is good writing, because the comedy and the horror come from character, not from shock. You laugh because the philosophy is sound and the application is insane. Every kill is earned by the premise. Tom Schilling plays Björn as a man who has genuinely found peace, which is exactly what makes it disturbing. The violence means something because it is attached to a person we understand, making choices we can trace. You are never lost as to why any of it is happening.

Why the second season does not

Season two, which arrived this year, keeps the actor, the look, the calm voice, and throws away the one thing that mattered. It forgot why we cared.

The opening episode has Björn kill a waiter he holds a grudge against. The grudge traces back to a childhood humiliation: as a boy, after a hike, his own father refused to let him eat at the bistro like everyone else. That memory is the motive. A whole human being is dispatched over an old wound the man himself had almost nothing to do with. And by the finale he has worked his way up to killing two more, a mafia boss and a tech-startup founder, the founder having come looking for revenge because the mafia boss had decapitated a woman he loved. On paper that last one has stakes. On screen it lands with nothing, because by then the show has trained you to expect a body every episode and to feel nothing about any of them.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. Season one was a show about a man who kills for reasons you can follow. Season two is a show about a man who kills because it is episode three and something has to happen. The mindfulness is still there as set dressing, but it has stopped driving anything. The killing has become the point instead of the consequence, and killing for its own sake is just noise with a body count. What is the show actually about now? I could not tell you. I do not think it could tell you either.

A villain needs a reason

Here is the contrast that made it click for me. Think about John Wick, a franchise built on violence so stylised it is basically ballet. On paper it should have the same problem, wall-to-wall killing, hundreds of bodies. It does not, and the reason is the first fifteen minutes. They kill his dog. The last gift from his dead wife, the thing tethering him to the life he was trying to have. It is almost embarrassingly simple, and it works completely, because every single person watching has some version of it. The toy that got smashed. The bully in year six. The pet that did not come home. You are handed a reason to want the violence, and then the film pays it off for two hours.

That is the contract. You do not need the motive to be noble, or even proportionate. John Wick's response is wildly out of proportion, and that is the joke and the thrill of it. But you need it to be legible. You need a door into why this matters to this person. Murder Mindfully season one understood that in its bones. Season two bricked the door up and kept swinging.

The part that actually worries me

I could leave it there as a review, but the thing nagging at me is bigger than one show. This is not an isolated bad season. It is the texture of a lot of what gets made now.

Look at the numbers. Franchise and IP-based films pulled in around 73 percent of domestic box office in 2025. The 2026 slate is more of the same, with genuinely original films making up less than two-fifths of the lineup, and more than thirty sequels shipped in a single recent year. Star Wars, Marvel, another Toy Story, another Scream, another Jumanji. Even the audience is visibly tiring of it, and yet the machine keeps reaching for the thing that already exists rather than the thing nobody has seen. Murder Mindfully season two is that instinct in miniature: take the thing that worked, strip it for parts, ship it again.

The uncomfortable question is why the well is running dry. My honest suspicion is that it is partly us. We consume more story than any humans in history, and we make less of our own. The research on this is not subtle: heavy passive phone use, the endless scroll, is associated with measurable drops in self-assessed creativity and sustained attention. Creativity needs the thing we have engineered out of our days, boredom, the empty moment where the mind wanders and connects things. The default mode network, where a lot of creative synthesis actually happens, only switches on when we stop feeding it. We have built a world with no gaps left to daydream in, and then we wonder why the stories feel thinner.

Then AI walks in

Now drop generative AI into that already-dry landscape, and you get the question I cannot stop turning over. Does it refill the well, or drain it faster?

The optimistic case is real. These tools genuinely lift an individual's output. A first draft in seconds, a hundred variations of a scene, a way past the blank page. Used well, AI is a bicycle for a tired imagination.

But the studies that have looked at it at scale keep finding the same catch. AI-assisted writers produce work that is individually better and collectively more samey. Give a room full of writers the same model and their ideas converge, because the model has a centre of gravity, the most statistically average version of everything it was trained on, and it quietly pulls everyone toward it. Researchers call it homogenization, and it shows up in fiction, ideas, ad copy, and images alike. The machine is superb at the middle of the distribution. Originality lives at the edges, and the edges are exactly what an averaging engine sands down.

So the worry is not that AI writes a bad Murder Mindfully season two. It is that AI makes it effortless to write ten thousand of them, all competent, all reasonable, all forgettable, and that a generation of writers who lean on it never builds the muscle that produces the dog in John Wick. That instinct, the weird, specific, deeply human choice that makes a story land, is not the average of anything. You cannot autocomplete it. You get it by being a person who has sat with boredom, felt a real grudge, loved a real pet, and paid attention to what that felt like.

What I actually think

I am not a doomer about this, for the same reason I am not a doomer about AI generally: the tool does not decide. We do. AI can be the thing that clears away the drudgery so you have more room for the one idea only you would have had, or it can be the thing you outsource the idea to, right up until you have forgotten how to have one. Homogenization is a tendency, not a sentence, and the studies that find it also find it can be pushed back with a bit of deliberate friction and a refusal to just accept the first suggestion.

Season one of Murder Mindfully is what it looks like when someone takes a genuinely strange idea and follows it bravely all the way down. Season two is what it looks like when the strangeness is gone and only the format remains. That gap is the whole ballgame, for television and for us. The tools are about to get very good at producing season two on demand. The thing worth protecting, in Hollywood and at your desk and in your own head, is whatever it still takes to make a season one.

A villain needs a reason. So does a story. So, it turns out, do we.

Sources

• Murder Mindfully (Netflix, based on Karsten Dusse's novels)
• The Queen's Journal: Hollywood's originality problem on display in 2026's most anticipated films
• CNBC: Hollywood's box-office problem, the old sequel trick is falling flat
• The Conversation: How smartphones weaken attention spans in children and adults
• ScienceDirect: Homogenizing effect of large language models on creative diversity
• Digital Content Next: Does generative AI aid or homogenize human creativity?