Taking A Mental[ist] Health Day
We're deep in the middle of moving, with most of our media at the new place while we pack and stage stuff here, so we were somewhat ill-prepared for the internet to have trouble connecting to our streaming box in the bedroom, necessitating retrieving a disc player out of the packed bedroom box and hooking it up to the television in order to have something playing in the back while we packed or rested from packing. The TV now sits on the floor with its HDMI cable snaking to a 4K blu-ray player sitting next to a power strip, looking for all the world like I just moved into my first adult apartment and haven't secured any real furniture, just premium electronics. All that's missing is the folding chair.
Because most of our disc-based media is already at the new place, we have limited options on what to watch. The full inventory of TV and movies available here comprise1:
1 x Criterion Blu-ray of McCabe & Mrs. Miller
1 x Blu-ray of the complete series of HBO's The Outsider.
1 x Blu-ray of 2019's cinema classic CATS
1 x DVD set of all 7 seasons of The Mentalist
The Mentalist is a relatively recent discovery for me, although my partner watched most of the episodes as they aired in the late aughts. I heard someone discussing it briefly on a podcast a few years ago, and when it turned up on a streaming service shortly thereafter, I started putting it on to keep Oswald company whenever we'd go out. This led to me actually watching some of the episodes and discovering to my great surprise that I really like it. I had always put it in the same category as things like CSI, NCIS, Numbers, etc.: High concept super-cop shows that trick people into believing that most police work is skilled deduction aided by magic-adjacent forensic science. Instead it mostly focuses on a task force that goes around California solving weird crimes with the aid of a former con-man psychic who uses his cold reading abilities to trick ne'er-do-wells into revealing themselves. The ex-con-man, Patrick Jane, is played by Simon Baker, and is a major part of the appeal of the show, as he oozes smarmy charisma, but also a deep sincerity born of his late-life secular conversion experience after his family was murdered by a serial killer after he went on TV claiming to have psychic visions of the killer's identity. From the outset of the show he's unambiguous about the fact that there is no supernatural component to his abilities, just careful observation and a hard-won understanding about how desperate people behave.
This really makes The Mentalist more of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche than anything else, which is part of why it can run for seven seasons without wearing out its welcome. Well, I assume it won't wear out its welcome, as I've actually only ever seen a handful of episodes, and only started watching them in sequence yesterday. This is the other thing that makes The Mentalist unusual: It is not a show with deep continuity, at least in the episodes I've watched. The information above is enough background for you to enjoy almost any episode of the show you might happen to come across in the wild. You can sit down and enjoy 42 minutes of Simon Baker being aloof and amused while the bodies pile up around him and the actual cops he works with keep chasing down the wrong leads without having to worry about where you are in the emotional arc of the series. This makes it much easier to watch casually than most shows of the past twenty years, which usually have important long-form narrative beats sprinkled through episodes that make it unsatisfying to pop in and out of. This isn't to say there's no continuity or character development, but it is much less essential here than almost everywhere else.
At any rate, we're set to move all of our large furniture next Monday, and should be living full time in the new apartment by the end of this week, when the internet gets fully shut off here. Meanwhile, I pack, I watch some episodes of The Mentalist, I pack again.
1 - My partner just informed me that we also have the complete box set of Murder, She Wrote packed in a box here, but that is a late discovery and therefore irrelevant to the above.
