Remember when they used to call CBS the Tiffany Network? These days, it’s the Xerox Network, its new shows like perfect third- or fourth- generation copies that can’t be told from the originals — “CSI” if they’re dramas, “Two and a Half Men” if they’re comedies.
If a new idea slips through, the network’s crack team of hack screenwriters falls on it like antibodies attacking an invading microbe, mercilessly pounding it into submission.
Such is the sad fate of “The Mentalist,” a potentially offbeat crime drama about a charlatan-psychic- turned-cop that debuts at 8 tonight on KCNC-Channel 4.
The smirky cynicism, savage mockery of New Age verities and prickly atheism of its lead character could have made “The Mentalist” fascinating (if not altogether pleasant) viewing. Instead, it turns down the same formulaic path as CBS’s other police procedurals, a sort of CSI-with-a- fake-crystal-ball.
To be fair, “The Mentalist” is not just one more damaged offspring of CBS inbreeding. It’s a breathtaking conceptual rip-off of another network’s show: USA’s 3-year-old “Psych,” which also features a phony psychic working with the police.
But where “Psych” is played for belly laughs, “The Mentalist” goes for grim chuckles, or even just grim. Simon Baker plays Patrick Jane, a one- time celebrity psychic who went straight a few years ago after his showboating backfired catastrophically on his family. Now Jane uses the same sharp perceptions that once helped him fleece his marks to help cops break cases.
What makes this work is Baker, an Australian actor who specializes in profoundly dark character studies. In “The Guardian,” a 2001-04 CBS legal drama, he played a vicious corporate lawyer avoiding prison for a cocaine bust by doing pro bono work for a children’s agency.
He brings the same sneering intensity to this role. Jane, in Baker’s hands, is no civic-minded crimebuster but a cynic who assumes that everything and everybody is fake until proven otherwise. His police colleagues aren’t there to help anyone but to satisfy a prurient fascination with life’s ghoulish underbelly.
“There is no more,” he scathingly warns the other cops on his squad as they eat a seafood dinner. “There is no other side. This is it — lobster and bread rolls and nautical kitsch. Then nothingness.”
Hollywood has long been irreligious (when was the last time you saw an on-screen clergyman who didn’t turn out to be a grafter or a child molester?) but usually stops short of outright atheism, opting instead for a Unitarianish one-size-fits- all God.
Jane’s aggressive heathenness is one of his most transfixing qualities.
A weekly series, though, needs a story to go with its characters, and “The Mentalist” is undone by the same poor storytelling that makes other CBS procedurals so unwatchable. The only difference is that seemingly insoluble mysteries are cracked not by some “CSI” geek at a microscope spouting incomprehensible pseudoscience jargon but by Jane’s equally inexplicable intuitive leaps.
