I think it has potential, but I hope they figure out better ways to use the guy’s skills – they, the storytellers, plus the cops on the show. I wasn’t clear exactly who the cops on the show are, and how Simon Baker fits in. For instance, in the opening scene – he basically gets the woman to shoot her husband, and they just move on to the next scene? Was I not paying close enough attention or did that really not make sense?
I have hopes that this could turn out to be entertaining, so I’ll give it another try or two – but I’m not as hopeful about it as I was just hearing the pre-season descriptions.
I think the premise has a lot of potential as well. I just hope they don’t over explain everything and keep it smart.
The beginning made sense to me.
Main guy shows up at crime scene. Notices small things, like the tattoo on the coroner, the dress and demeanor of the main suspect and the way the victims parnets interact while speaking to the press. Husband gets grabbibng and holding onto wife, who has arms crossed and repeatedly pulls away.
Main guy then goes into house, makes a sandwich and a pot of tea. He takes in house and photos in the house, notably photobooth strip of Husband/father with daughter in his lap and him holding onto daughter, which rang my alarm bells more than him grabbing and holding onto his wife outside.
Mother comes in and finds main guy. Main guy thinks Mother/wife suspects her husband, the father of her murdered daughter and tells her why.
No, I got all of that – what I didn’t get is that the wife shoots the husband (who lives? dies?) and the main guy just kind of says “oopsie” and there don’t seem to be any repercussions from a cop talking “off the record” to the wife of a suspect in a conversation that ends with the wife shooting the husband.
You don’t just … segue to the next scene from there.
Overall I thought it was a decent pilot. So far it hasn’t amazed me, but I’ll probably keep watching. Simon Baker, was really good, Robin Tunney was decent, but the rest of the team all blended together. I know it’s Baker’s show but I hope they distinguish the rest of the characters a little bit more.
One small thing that gets me is that I’m tired of almost every cop show having a cop that has had a family member killed. In almost every crime procedural it seems like one of the main characters is a cop because of the horrible crime committed against a family member, or a family member will be killed sometime during the course of the show. But I guess it’s a crime show convention that I’ll just have to accept, just like having a guy a maverick and doesn’t follow the rules, or having sexual tension between one of the guys and one of the girls on the team.
My first thought even before I saw the show was ‘What a horrible title.’ After I watched it I thought the lame title fit the lame show.
It’s a series based on a gimmick, a gimmick currently being used in two other detective shows. The premise is already old. And this one just seems really thin and takes itself way to seriously. The ending scene in his bedroom…talk about over the top. I didn’t know you could jump the shark in the first episode.
I watched it because I find Simon Baker to be smoking hot and I would watch him read the phone book. But I did also enjoy the show.
There already seems to be a House/Cuddy relationship set up where he is the effective renegade and she has to begrudgingly fail at reining him in. And he is convinced there is no afterlife, as House is.
I enjoyed it, though the female detective was too young and pretty. My main quibble with it is that it was too easy to guess who the real killer was due to the Law of Conservation of Characters. The premise is similar to Psych but the approach is totally different. It has alot of potential.
The first time I saw it advertised, I was watching TV with my Dad. The voice over says “Simon Baker in… The Mentalist”, I burst out laughing and Dad exclaimed “You’ve got to be joking!”. It sounds like a parody title.
The only thing that irritated me in this show was his dunking the tea bag up and down. You’d think an Aussie would know better. (Or did tea-drinking as a national past time not make it over there?)
So, of all the big and little issues that usually drive me batty in television shows, that’s not bad at all! I liked it. I’m not a fan of cop procedurals (I don’t watch any of the CSI/Law and Order breed), but this one has caught my interest.
I bet I would have liked *Psych *as well, but it came out when our DVR was nearly full, so I didn’t start that one.
I liked it, I just hope “Red John” keeps his appearences to a minimum. Guy being tortured about the deaths of his wife and daughter is a bit trite already…
I was interested in the new member of the team and her view that “the kingdom of god is real” vs. the main character’s view that “there is no other side”. Is either of them going to move their opinion during the course of the first season? If so, I predict it is the main character who may come, grudgingly, to admit that there may be some kind of life after death.
I turned off the first episode after the flashback began that had the obvious outcome. I see from comments here that the obvious outcome was, in fact, the thing that moved him to become a real detective (or whatever he is) instead of a fake mentalist.
Roddy
Exactly. I DVRd The Mentalist, and my takeaway is that it’s like what would happen if Psych took itself seriously, unself-conciously engaged in TV conventions, lost the good writing, and had few sympathetic characters.
I mean, come on: even the reason he decided to become a “real” detective is cliche. Simon Baker’s hot, but he’s not hot enough to endure this show.