The last time I took a stab at watching Criminal Minds, the story revolved around an adorable young boy who enticed women shopping at the mall into helping him find his daddy.

What the women discovered was a deadly trap — Daddy was a serial killer who found them first, then kidnapped and tortured them until they died horrific deaths.

The creepy closing scene had a captured pop proudly telling the cops that he didn’t even ask for the last victim; his elementary school-aged boy had brought her to him all on his own.

That’s when I decided the nightmares weren’t worth sticking with this show.

But after seeing the series steadily holding in the Top 10 primetime Nielsen ratings week after week, there seemed to be something I was missing. So, putting the creep factor on hold, I plunged in and discovered that this show has become an addictive delight.

The series focuses more on the character of the criminal than the crime itself, although most of the heinous acts play out in excruciating detail. These crimes aren’t for the fainthearted, though there’s more humor and humanity in the series than what first meets the eye. Seldom, however, have there been lead characters with such dark back stories attached.

Booth from Bones might have had a troubled childhood with a hard-core dad and a brother he now keeps covering for, but he had a downright 1950s Leave it to Beaver family life compared to Criminal Minds’ resident hottie Derek Morgan, played by pin-up guy Shemar Moore. Morgan is smooth as good whiskey around the ladies, and he leads his team with an unwaivering self-assurance. But when he was 10, his father died and he was put under the protective wing of the leader of a local youth center. The leader helped him out of his poverty by getting him a football scholarship, but the closet predator also sexually abused Morgan for most of his young life.

Sweet geeks have remained a crime drama staple, puttering around their labs and looking up to the real detectives. But behind sweet geek Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) is another very troubled childhood. Dad deserted him and he was left in the care of mom, a paranoid schizophrenic who he later had to institutionalize. Talk about some guilt. And the young genius took more than his fair share of bullying over the years, including once being tied up naked to the school’s football goalpost for all the students to see. Thank goodness for early graduation.

In one particularly touching episode — well, it did also include the plot about a guy who picked up women and then tortured them to death in a ritual involving cleaning fluids — Morgan helped Reid connect with a comely bartender. Reid even raced to her rescue at the end before cleaning became the death of her.

Then there’s the perpetually morose unit chief Aaron “Hotch” Hotchner. At first I thought it was just the years that actor Thomas Gibsom had to spend in the odd sitcom Dharma & Greg that made him go for the dark side. But no — turns out his character suffers from not being able to put his family first. Can you blame him after what he had to put up with when he was married to dippy hippie Dharma? Wait, I’m mixing characters.

In any case, Hotch has lost the wife who loved him and his young son — she decided that playing second string to a life of chasing down depraved killers just wasn’t how she saw her future.

Oh, and Hotch is almost deaf because of car explosion last season. It smacked a little of the old CSI storyline with Grissom’s brush with deaf, but we’ll forgive CM for now.

Meanwhile, I’m going back to those past season episodes to play catch-up. Any suggestions?