When I started watching The Mentalist, I thought I was just getting another crime investigation show... the type where somebody gets murdered, the police arrive, everyone looks suspicious, evidence is collected, and eventually somebody gets arrested but then Patrick Jane shows up and this man is something else.
Patrick Jane, played by Simon Baker, is a former fake psychic who becomes a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation... He doesn't have supernatural powers. He simply has an almost ridiculous ability to observe people, notice tiny details, manipulate conversations and figure out what people are hiding and honestly, watching him solve cases is probably the best part of the whole series...
Jane doesn't investigate like everyone else.... He'll walk into a crime scene, annoy everybody, insult the suspects, drink tea like he's sitting in his living room, and somehow figure out what happened while everyone else is still looking at the evidence.
Sometimes I genuinely wondered how the other detectives didn't just get tired of him but that's what makes him so entertaining.
He's incredibly intelligent, but he's also arrogant, childish, manipulative and sometimes completely reckless and underneath all of that is a very broken man because Jane's story isn't really about solving crimes... It's about Red John..
Before the series begins, Jane used to pretend to be a psychic. During one of his television appearances, he provoked the serial killer Red John, who retaliated by murdering Jane's wife and daughter. From that point, Jane becomes obsessed with finding him and this is where the show becomes much more than a regular procedural.
Every episode can give you a new murder case, but somewhere underneath everything is this bigger story about Jane hunting the person who destroyed his life... You can actually feel the difference between the funny Patrick Jane and the Patrick Jane who is thinking about Red John... The funny guy disappears and what you see instead is anger, grief and revenge.
That contrast is one of the reasons Simon Baker's performance works so well for me.
He can make Jane hilarious in one scene and genuinely heartbreaking in the next.
I also really enjoyed the relationship between Jane and Teresa Lisbon, played by Robin Tunney.
At the beginning, Lisbon is basically the person constantly trying to stop Jane from doing something stupid and Jane is constantly doing something stupid but over time, you start noticing that there's something deeper between them... It's a very slow relationship, and I mean VERY slow...
There were times I was watching and thinking, "Guys, please just talk to each other." But I actually appreciated the slow development because it didn't feel forced...
Then there's Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt, who make up the rest of the team...
Cho especially became one of my favorites because He's calm, serious and almost impossible to read, which makes him a perfect contrast to Jane's personality...
The team chemistry is one of the reasons the regular murder cases don't become boring .... The Red John storyline is what kept me watching...
The mystery builds for years, and there are moments where you genuinely start suspecting almost everybody and when the story finally reaches that point, it feels like the end of an era for the show...
After Red John is dealt with, The Mentalist changes quite a bit. The CBI story comes to an end and Jane eventually moves into the FBI world, giving the series a different direction.
I started The Mentalist because I wanted clever murder mysteries.
I ended up caring about these characters.
Jane stopped feeling like just a clever detective and started feeling like a person who had spent years trying to figure out how to live after losing everything.
That's what stayed with me.
Patrick Jane is one of those characters who can carry an entire series and Simon Baker absolutely owns the role..
Seven seasons and 151 episodes later, I understand why this show still has such a loyal audience.
Rating: 85/100
