It's tantamount to a confession, and one that has been made previously, but I really like 'The Mentalist'. It was one of the most likeable shows on television and very high up there on my list of most watched series. It's simply a great show in my mind, but one which was almost never talked about except in the negative sense. It did have the bad fortune to be made at the same time as the similar show 'Psyche', and get labelled as 'the copy' and unimaginative, but it went beyond that by tapping into some things that were generally out of fashion and by doing everything it tried with ease.
'The Mentalist' falls into the sweet gap between episodic and serialised television, with runs of 'cases of the week' that served to space out and add time between events in the overarching narrative of the eponymous Mentalist, the curiously named Patrick Jane and his friends. Serialisation is not something I like, but this mixed approach has always worked nicely. The key to the early success of the show is that rogueish central character, as played by Simon Baker, who is really a leading man of the old school, someone who could have stood up to the company of the Shatner, Robert Vaughn from 'The Man From UNCLE', or James Garner in anything. Such a charismatic throwback could only come from Australia! He takes the sometimes tortured central character, and his vengeful quest, and makes it palatable. In second place was Robin Tunney as his liaison at the California Bureau of Investigation, Teresa Lisbon, a grand infatuation fueller, and then her team.
It really shouldn't work. It should fall into the 'too many beautiful people' trap and stink, but that was averted. Somehow, they managed to cast a bunch of people who really did grow into their roles until you stopped noticing how glamorous they were, especially Tim Kang as Agent Kimball Cho. Cho was such a great and wonderful breakout as the incredible stoic that he was carried over into the epilogue of the series. In some ways it's the reverse of Star Trek spinoff syndrome, where they put together the too large extended cast, which never matures and becomes a millstone about the neck. Why does it work? After all that gushing above, which neglected the occasionally great writing, it probably does all have to come down to Simon Baker, who manages to pull off the double trick of being an old school charming lead and bringing out the best in his ensemble cast. He makes it work.
The central arc, the story of ex-fraud Patrick Jane attempting to catch the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter by working with the police, goes up and down, and for probably a little too long. For five and a bit seasons, the killer Red John was set up as a semi-mystical entity, who might be the real psychic that Jane always claimed to not exist, but then turned out to be an utterly normal person person with connections. It didn't work at all, after so long setting up a thematic mystery that ran as a counterpoint to Jane himself, but the epilogue was some compensation. Again, the epilogue should really have been a mess, an unwelcome tying up of loose ends and putting together of Jane and Lisbon, and tying up of loose strings. It shouldn't work, but does. It was lovely to see the two happy.
I'll never really understand why 'The Mentalist' is so high on my favourites list, but it is. It never seems to fail, has a solid cast which struggled a little at the beginning, but succeeds with a charm all its own, as if it had emerged from a much earlier time in television history. It might even be the last television series I will have collected, chronologically, but this will remain to be seen.
O.
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