Call it “CSI: Lite” – CBS’s new drama, “The Mentalist,” gives you the familiar Who Done It? crime formula but delivers it with suave, breezy style.
That suave style is delivered by none other than eternally suave actor Simon Baker with his uber-self-assuredness and Cheshire cat grin that he brought to such roles as “Devil Wears Prada’s” dashing writer who swept away Anne Hathaway.
“The Mentalist” is the perfect vehicle for Baker who is given free reign to strut around and show off his breezy all-knowingness as a former phony TV psychic who has now joined the California Bureau of Investigation helping to solve murders.
Patrick Jane admits he’s not a psychic – he’s “just paying attention.” He simply sees what’s in plain sight staring us all right in the face.
Sitting slouched at a desk with his hand holding up his smashed cheek like a bored student in math class, Jane watches the mannerisms of a suspect being interviewed through a one-way mirror and coolly predicts “He and Allison were lovers.” Sure enough two seconds later the suspect admits, “Allison and I were lovers.”
Yet, Baker’s magic is preventing Jane from coming off as annoying or cocky. Jane is a breath of fresh air amongst his stiff and skeptical colleagues, and he wins them and the audience over with his dead-on assumptions – although the colleagues are less likely to admit it.
Jane wins the audience over because he’s super smart and has the resourcefulness of Jack Nicholson’s wily detective in “Chinatown.” Jane knows to tell the killer who draws a gun on him that he already took out the bullets and when the killer looks away to check the gun, Jane runs like hell downstairs to the awaiting investigators. Or when a psychiatrist asks him what’s keeping him up at night, Jane avoids his personal angst and instead passes off Johnny Cash’s personal story of his brother getting killed as his own.
But, “The Mentalist” isn’t all fun and games. The pilot is centered around a murder similar to those committed by notorious serial killer “Red John” who’s known for leaving smiley faces dripped in blood on the wall above the crime scene, and we learn that Jane has a personal connection to Red John.
In the final haunting scene, we see Jane return to a quiet house and curl up on an air mattress underneath a murderous red smiley face and we know that “The Mentalist” is going to give us one complex and interesting protagonist.
CBS Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Eastern
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