10 Great TV Shows That Lost It By The End
9. The Mentalist
The Mentalist was a procedural murder investigation show with a difference: the mentalist of the title, Patrick Jane, was the USP, a smarmy attention-seeking former showman and carny whod parlayed his skills into a career as a fake psychic. A serial killer known as Red John had killed Janes wife and daughter, and hed renounced his conman ways and joined the California Bureau of Investigation. Hed use his Derren Brown style powers of observation, memory and manipulation as a freelance consultant while abusing the CBIs resources to hunt Red John.
There you go: thats the shows formula and arc plot, summarised in a nutshell, and it worked perfectly for five whole seasons: 115 episodes of highly entertaining, oddly old-fashioned detective procedural, with the occasional arc-based episode detailing a new wrinkle in the teams hunt for the Machiavellian serial killer at the heart of the show (every episode title would retain a reference to a shade of red to hint at Janes obsession).
So why producer Bruno Heller felt the need to have Jane catch and kill Red John in the anticlimactic eighth episode of season sixs twenty-two-episode run is beyond anyone. Thats a season finale moment, at the very least: a series finale, by rights. To mark the change, episode nine aired a week later took place two years later and saw Jane and co. join the FBI. Every episode from then on featured a title with a different colour but the whole point of the show had changed, and not for the better.
Without Red John to act as a foil, The Mentalist (both show and character) had no focus, no drive and no mystique Jane was reduced to an irritating know-it-all only one step away from prison. With the protagonist having completely lost his mojo, the shorter seventh season saw further diminishing returns, as if everyone else involved were sleepwalking their way through the show too. The series finale a damp squib based around a wedding, of all things couldnt come soon enough.