by Rajan Khanna

While most of my focus on the current television premiere season will be on genre shows (because there are certainly enough of them), occasionally I like to watch and try other kinds of programs. So it was last night that I passed up the increasingly boring (to me) Fringe for CBS' The Mentalist, starring Simon Baker.

The Mentalist is, at its heart, a police procedural, perfectly placed on a network that contains not one, but three CSI shows, NCIS, Numbers, Without a Trace, and Criminal Minds, all about law enforcement officers using specific sets of skills and abilities (and SCIENCE!) to capture criminals.

The Mentalist fits well into this mold. Aussie Simon Baker (demonstrating the common Australian acting ability to render perfect American accents) plays a consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation. Simon's character, Patrick Jane, has the ability to read people using his keen skills of observation – by body language, by the cues and items that he sees. It's a skill he employed, to his own benefit, by playing a psychic for years. Imagine John Edwards. But smoother and better looking.

Jane's life changes when he is brought on a serial killer case and in his hubris, claims to understand the serial killer in question. The serial killer responds by killing Jane's wife and child.

Which brings us to the present of the show, where Jane, cynical now and jaded, and in need of sleeping pills, is a regular consultant for the police department. His methods are unorthodox, and people don't always like him, but he gets results. In fact, judging by the pilot, he is the only one on the squad who does. The rest of the police officers seem to be around mostly for comic relief (in the case of the men), for opposing religious views (in the case of new to the team Grace Van Pelt played by Amanda Righetti) or as a foil for Jane (Teresa Lisbon, head of the unit, played by Robin Tunney).

My chief complaint on watching the premiere was that the concept didn't seem terribly original. Police procedurals are, of course, a dime a dozen, but keen observational skills and uncanny intuition have been used before – played for laughs on Psych, for example, or seriously in the case of the leads of Millenium and Profiler.

The unique element here is Jane's past as a fake psychic and I think that's the element that needs to be played up here. Jane was a crook – a liar, someone who played on people's grief for fame and fortune. And that was the cause of his downfall.

He also seems a bit cracked. This manifests as a bit of a sick sense of humor and a kind of non-empathy with people, not caring, for example, that a woman shoots her husband right in front of him (although, to be fair, the husband was a child molester and a murderer).

While the show did a good job of introducing us to the characters and situations, the mystery aspect of the show wasn't terribly interesting. The killer was fairly obvious and the method of figuring it out seemed simple. I hope that this was just because they were focusing on introducing the characters and the show and future cases will be more satisfying.

Additionally, it's clear that this is Baker's show. He dominates the screen and the screen time and the other characters are barely touched upon. This is something else that I hope is rectified as Tunney seems woefully underused and Baker is in desperate need of a foil that does more than just act cranky towards him.

The Mentalist turned in impressive numbers for its premiere, though it remains to be seen how it will fare in future weeks. I'm willing to give it another few episodes, and hopefully it will find its legs.

The Mentalist pilot will be aired again on CBS on Friday, September 26 at 8 PM EST.

A question for anyone who is reading this right now – when you try out a new television series, in the world of DVRs and digitial downloads, how many episodes do you give yourself to “click” with it? How many episodes does it take for you to decide if you will stick with it or not? I'm interested in hearing your responses on our message board.