Fall 2009 TV Series Preview: The Mentalist

The Mentalist, starring Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, is about a private investigator who works with Teresa Lisbon and her unit in the CBI. Patrick's character is somewhat on the loose side, where as he doesn't follow rules very well, and his actions can cause dangerous results. Jane has a non social attitude and has a disturbing background, yet he takes his mind game abilities and uses it against the people to get the information he needs, calm, cool, and collected. Jane's desire to solve mysteries and crimes stems from a past event involving his wife and daughter who were murdered by Red John, and Jane plans to find him no matter what. The season finale ends with Jane shooting the biggest lead he had to finding him, to save Lisbon.

Since the finale ended with Patrick Jane saving Lisbon, the season premiere should be an excellent start for the next season, since this fall, The mentalist will be stacked up against these season premiere's on Thursday night.

* CSI: Crime Scene Investigators, a crime lab team trys to solve the murder of victims in the Las Vegas area.

* Flash Forward, a new series this year, and lots like a hit in the making.

* Grey's Anatomy, a medical drama series where the surgery team performs many life threatening surgeries.

Throughout the fall season Patrick Jane's character will have to out best these already established criminal series to stay in the fall season line up next year. Medium has already been taken out of the fall season running for 2009.

* CSI: Miami
* NCIS
* NCIS: Los Angeles
* Criminal Minds
* CSI: NY
* Ghost Whisperer
* Numb3rs
* Cold Case
* Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
* Fringe
* Bones
* Castle
* The Forgotten

Since the new series aired in the fall, 2008, The Mentalist has become CBS's top criminal mystery series on the air. Considering the above list of this genre, that is an excellent establishment. I think that Patrick and his irky attitude will become a strong force in the long list of detective dramas.

If you missed out on the first season, good luck trying to find online episodes, because cbs.com took them off their website. Viewing the clips are as far as you are going to get. After attempting to access the episodes on other free online sites, they are all clips as well. If you want to start where the first season left off, the Season Premiere will air on Thursday September 24th at 10pm, on it's new day and time on CBS.