TUESDAY, MAY 26
MENTAL
And Tori, Too
A handful of new shows premiere tonight – CW’s Hitched or Ditched, Science Channel’s Science of the Movies and TLC’s The Little Couple.
But perhaps none is more promising than Fox’s Mental, a show about an unorthodox British doctor in a Los Angles psychiatric hospital.
If that sounds somewhat similar to Fox’s hit House, it is.
Although, watching Mental is a bit like being transported to a parallel universe. It’s definitely not House and, yet, it feels like it almost is.
Chris Vance plays the unorthodox doctor. He treats mentally ill patients with kindness. But his approach is decidedly at odds with convention, and sometimes the law.
He gets naked in the hospital lobby to, I don’t know, treat a patient who’s also naked.
He breaks into a patient’s house in the middle of the night to, I don’t know, gain some insight that will help determine the patient’s treatment.
And, for anyone familiar with Los Angeles, the setting for Mental is a slight distraction. It looks and feels a lot more like Seattle.
The setting is actually quite nice. But it’s Bogota, Colombia uneasily sitting in for Los Angeles. But that’s a minor quibble – the show is produced in Colombia for international distribution, so that tiny wobble is forgivable.
The show itself gets off to an uneven start. Tonight’s premiere episode is rough around the edges, and the characters are slow to come into focus.
Next week’s episode is stronger and I hope an indication of Mental’s development. I would like the networks to roll out more original, scripted shows in the summer, so I’m rooting for Mental.
Meanwhile, for something quite different, the new season of Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood premieres tonight on Oxygen – click on Video Clips to watch a preview.
May 26th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
This is one of those shows that probably could only be pulled off by the British–one that would get very lost in translation in the United States. Love ya, Kev!