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| TV Reviews | |
with a noticeable limp New Fox medical drama is largely a ripoff of 'House' May 26, 2009
It reaches no further than Fox's "House." Too many elements are familiar: There’s the rule-breaking physician, his attractive female boss (who’s all business except for her necklines) and the young residents who are sent out of the hospital to investigate cases while discussing whether or not they’ll have sexual relations. The main difference is that on "Mental," the maverick physician, Jack Gallagher (Chris Vance), is a psychiatrist working in a hospital’s mental health department. (Maybe the show should have been titled "Nut House.") He’s also jollier and less misanthropic than Dr. House. In fact, at times "Mental" recalls the Robin Williams movie "Patch Adams." Jack strips naked to win the trust of a violent schizophrenic, does card tricks and makes the other doctors run a three-legged race with their patients. (Maybe the show should have been titled "Fun House.") That spirit of fun doesn’t pervade the show, which generally feels perfunctory. The characters’ motivations and backstories are spelled out in clunky expository dialogue ("You want the advice of a Harvard Business School graduate?") and are generally taken straight from the 21st century TV playbook. For example, few viewers will be shocked to learn that Jack and his boss, Nora Skloff (Annabella Sciorra), had a previous romantic relationship. One of Jack’s rivals, Veronica Hayden-Jones (Jacqueline McKenzie), says she was "screwed out of a job" when he was hired above her; she has an unsatisfying marriage and hears her biological clock ticking. The female psych resident, Dr. Chloe Artis (Marisa Ramirez), is a lesbian in a long-distance relationship. This doesn’t keep the male resident, Dr. Arturo Suarez (Nicholas Gonzalez), from making indecent proposals. These tend to be of the sort that has become another TV cliché: requests for no-strings-attached sex that are so crude and direct that they would never be uttered in real life. (He suggests she try "meaningless but hot sex with skilled but emotionally detached partners.") Dr. Jack is English, presumably because the show’s creators, the brother and sister team of Deborah Joy LeVine and Dan Levine ("Lois and Clark"), liked Chris Vance, who’s English. Maybe he doesn’t do American accents. Jack says that his parents worked in a Veterans Administration hospital when he was a kid, so he shouldn’t have any accent at all. (The script does suggest that maybe he’s making that story up.) In the first two episodes, Vance doesn’t show any particular skills that would be hard to find in America’s native talent pool. He has an increasingly annoying habit of reacting to other characters’ actions by looking in their eyes and smiling, an expression that often devolves into smirking. It’s understandable when one antagonist finally punches him in the mouth. The show itself was shot in Bogotá, Colombia, to save money. Though the exteriors are a reasonable approximation of Los Angeles, one can find oneself wondering how many of the extras in the scene have any idea what’s going on. The psychiatric mystery in the premiere—why is that aforementioned violent schizophrenic trying to scratch a drawing on his wall?—is relatively uninvolving, perhaps because so much time is devoted to setting up the recurring characters. The second episode, which spends less time on exposition and more on its central mystery, involving a woman who thinks she’s pregnant, works better. It makes good use of the show’s most innovative technique, quick cuts to glimpses of what the mentally ill patients are seeing. So there’s some hope for summer viewers who are looking for standard hospital drama and are willing to shut off the critical half of their brains. For them, "Mental" could be a home, if not a "House."
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