Almost in spite of myself, I kinda like The Mentalist. It’s sunnier and more predisposed toward jollity than your usual CBS crime procedural (which can often feel as though someone took a standard episode of CSI and put it in a blender set to puree). It’s got a fun play along at home aesthetic to it that lets you see what Patrick Jane is doing without ever really telegraphing why, exactly, he’s doing it, so you can try to jump ahead of his unorthodox crime-solving methods. It’s got a surprisingly winning central performance from Simon Baker, whom I previously found pretty lifeless in other shows he was in. And it’s all tied together by a writing staff led by Rome creator Bruno Heller, which manages to keep things humming along nicely. I don’t get super excited to watch The Mentalist from week to week, and I don’t think I saw every episode in season one, but it was always a nice little bit of goofy charm on Tuesdays. So, of course, CBS has moved it to the most crowded night on television, where it has become the exhaustion causing cherry atop a grueling sundae of network television.
In its first season, The Mentalist, which debuted amid catcalls from critics and fans alike that it was pretty much just Psych played straight, spent a little too much time trying to figure out what it was. It tried on a variety of guises, from glum and glowering CBS procedural to NCIS-esque comic ballet of death to slightly serialized parlor mystery. Finally, it just settled on a tone that mixed elements of all of those things and trusted Baker to put them all across. In many ways, The Mentalist is the CBS version of House, a somewhat compelling show anchored by a performance that’s better than most of the elements around it. Now, Simon Baker is no Hugh Laurie, and Patrick Jane is no Gregory House, but this show is far more dependent on its central performance than just about any CBS show on the dial. In that regard, it’s more similar to a classic ‘70s detective show than most of the other CBS procedurals, which seem to mostly have The X-Files as their ancestor.
The Mentalist isn’t afraid to be a little whimsical and goofy when the show calls for it. Unlike the other CBS crime dramas, which are all often overbearingly dark, the series takes place in a sunny, warm Northern California, where death and deception wait around every corner, yes, but the people who are going to fight back the wave of chaos all have a good-natured time bending the rules of law enforcement. Tonight, Patrick and his pals just break into a house to set a probably unnecessary trap (that ends up catching the murderer), and it’s hard not to think of some of the better examples of the ‘70s detective genre, like Columbo. The joke about The Mentalist is that Patrick catches killers by just noticing things really intensely (or looking at them really hard), but that’s also part of its appeal. Why is Patrick looking at this particular piece of evidence or this person’s tic? What could it possibly lead to? Half the fun is trying to get there before everyone else can.
Sadly, “Redemption” worked a little too hard to show everyone just how much fun this whole house of cards can be, since this was the show’s big coming out party in the post-CSI slot. The opening scene, where Patrick caught a murderer in a department store through a series of fun parlor tricks, was about as good a summation of the show’s central appeals as anything I can think of, but from there, the episode ended up with a going-through-the-motions case that didn’t quite show Patrick’s full abilities and sense of wacky fun (though I’ll admit his thought to set a trap for the killer by asking everyone he met about a man who had nothing to do with the case, then staking out that man’s house was a mystery-solving twist I didn’t see coming). Though I must admit that I can usually predict who the killers are on these sorts of shows, and on this one, I had the son pegged from the moment he appeared on screen, only to find out that the murderer was actually Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.