Mental Notes.(Mental)(Television program review)

There has been so much good television in the past decade ("The Sopranos" and "The West Wing," for example, started in 1999) that we can almost forget sometimes that TV programs are a commodity. When we love a show, we think of the skill and the gifts of those who created it, and of the actors, the writers, and possibly the directors involved, and occasionally the guy (it's always a guy, you may have noticed) who does the soundtrack. Beyond that, there's not much we need to know about how the show came into being. It's the mediocre shows that make you stop and wonder: How did this happen? What made anyone think that there was anything about this show that made it worth watching? Did anyone think that? The networks, ultimately, are not concerned with whether a show they put on the air is any good, at least not in the sense that viewers define the word. You see evidence of this all the time: a network renews a bad show, cancels a good show, or puts on a new show and promotes it as being terrific and later reveals that insiders knew all along that it stank, as Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Entertainment, did in the case of the ghastly 2003 comedy "Coupling."

"Mental," a new drama on Fox, starting May 26th, is solidly mediocre; it's not good, it's not terrible, and there's no reason for it to exist. It's set in the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles hospital, and, as the series begins, a new department head is about to arrive. The scuttlebutt is that he's not up to the task, since he's coming from a clinic in Vermont and couldn't possibly handle the pace or the problems of a big-city hospital. Pshaw! Of course he can! At the beginning of the first episode--after we've met two young psychiatric residents, their pissy supervisor, Dr. Carl Belle (Derek Webster), and a staff psychiatrist, Dr. Veronica Hayden-Jones (Jacqueline McKenzie), who was passed over for the job that the newcomer will be filling--there's a scene at the admitting desk, in which a wild-eyed, unkempt man shakes free of his handlers, strips his clothes off, and starts ranting and throwing things. (The actor who plays him, Silas Weir Mitchell, is frequently cast in roles like this one. The instant you see him, you know what's going to happen.) Out of the blue, another man near the desk, this one calm, handsome, kempt, with a gaze that telegraphs a quick intelligence, suddenly strips down, too, and speaks to the deranged man as though they were kindred spirits. Oh, hell, you think. This is the new guy. And so it is. It's Jack Gallagher (Chris Vance), who doesn't, you know, play by the rules. He has an immediate, intuitive grasp of the situation, and knows how to make the patient feel understood and less alone.

The scene doesn't ring true, and neither does most of what follows. Jack's a confident, iconoclastic charmer, or is meant to be; the way Vance conveys that is to smile boyishly, as if he were George Clooney flirting with a talk-show host, whether it's appropriate to the situation or not. It's quite annoying, actually, this implied connection between Gallagher's puckish smile and his medical ingenuity. Vance seems to have been cast for his looks, which are made up of five parts Sting, three parts a younger, better-looking ...