Available on DVD as of September 22, 2009

The Mentalist Season One was one of CBS Networks most successful series of the 2008-2009 television season with the pilot episode garnering a 15.6 million rating on its premiere and and 7.8 million for its encore airing three days later. It is also one of CBS’s more quirky and intelligent crime dramas. The Mentalist, created by Bruno Heller, is an adaptation of a premise as old as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: a man with the uncanny mental abilities to notice seemingly insignificant details or the smallest of clues and draw information from them that helps in the process of profiling and capturing criminals.

In this incarnation viewers were presented with Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker), a man who, up until five years ago, spent his life in the celebrity spotlight as a world-renowned “psychic”. It was then that Jane’s showboating need for the spotlight drew the attention of a cunning and enigmatic serial killer known only as Red John. After being mocked by the “psychic” on a national talk show, Red John retaliated by killing Jane’s wife and daughter. With his world shattered by this ruthless act of revenge, Patrick Jane admitted he feigned being psychic and began using his real abilities as a Mentalist to join the California Bureau of Investigation as a police consultant. While he works on solving other crimes as well in a manner that is found by those around him to be a bit eccentric but highly perceptive, his main drive is his relentless need to capture Red John: something that Jane is willing to sacrifice anything including his own life to do.

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