Here’s Why The Mentalist Was Cancelled By CBS

Remember that “Saturday Night Live” sketch about “Burn Notice” where the whole joke was that everyone has heard of “Burn Notice, but no one knows what “Burn Notice” is? Well, that’s kind of how I imagine a lot of people feel about “The Mentalist.” Who is this Mentalist? What is a Mentalist? And, if you’re a Brit like myself, why does it sound like a show about an absolute nutter?

Well, it turns out “The Mentalist” was actually a pretty popular series — not quite popular enough for our humble website to have written about it in any capacity prior to this article, but popular enough to run for 151 episodes across seven seasons. Full disclosure — in case you haven’t already guessed — I have not seen “The Mentalist,” but apparently a lot of people have, otherwise CBS wouldn’t have renewed this crime drama six times. 

Anyway, back to the question at hand: what is “The Mentalist?” Well, it’s a show about Patrick Jane, a man who used to be a “psychic” and now assists the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI — a real thing, by the way) in their, er… investigations. Simon Baker (of “The Devil Wears Prada” fame and winner, as it happens, of Marie Claire’s “March Dadness Tournament” 2019) plays the man in question. But Jane was never a “real” medium so, in his role as consultant to the CBI, he has to rely on his powers of observation. Sounds like a half-decent premise doesn’t it? Well, it was certainly good enough to sustain a full seven-year run, which raises the question of why the series eventually came to an end.

Simon Baker got his start on the soaps “Heartbreak High” and “Home and Away,” but “The Mentalist” was a decent step up. While you can’t really point to the show as an exemplar of the so-called “golden age of TV” heralded by the likes of such premium dramas as “Breaking Bad” (which premiered the same year as “The Mentalist”), you can at least consider it, in the words of The Washington Post, as “solid.”

So, what happened to CBS’ solid hit? After all, it lasted a couple more seasons after the end of “Breaking Bad.” Well, according to the Post, much of it had to do with a retooling of the show that occurred in season 6. Yes, after Walter White wrapped up his legendary fifth and final season, Patrick Jane was reassigned to work for the FBI, having tracked down “Red John,” the man responsible for his wife’s murder. Unfortunately, this reworking of the show, according to the Post, “wasn’t quite enough to save the series completely; as ratings dipped.”

In reality, ratings had already taken a hit prior to season 6. Season 4’s high was 14.22 million viewers, while season 5’s was 11.06 million. But even prior to the season 5 dip, “The Mentalist” had gone from pulling in 19.70 million at the height of its season 1 popularity to the 14.22 million it managed in season 4. Average ratings for season 3 were 15.24 million, while season 4 managed 14.57. In other words, there were hints of a downward trajectory even before the fifth season and its 11.82 average came into play. In that sense, the big season 6 switch-up can’t be entirely to blame for the eventual demise of “The Mentalist.” In fact, that reboot was designed to try to revitalize the series.

Though it would ultimately suffer from a marked decrease in viewership, “The Mentalist” initially benefited from airing directly after “NCIS” in CBS’ Tuesday pm slot. It then moved to Thursdays at 10pm and remained there for four seasons, eventually transitioning to a 10pm Sunday slot. During that time, production company Warner Bros. TV managed to wrangle a sweet off-network syndication deal for the show, which had also become popular overseas (France, in particular, loved “The Mentalist”). So, things were going well for Patrick Jane.

But as the average ratings clearly showed, “The Mentalist” wasn’t quite managing to maintain its popularity Stateside, even as France continued to be enamored with the show. During this time, creator Bruno Heller — who was also the showrunner on HBO’s “Rome” — and writer/executive producer Tom Szentgyorgyi were being called into Peter Roth’s office at Warner Brothers TV to discuss retooling the series. As Szentgyorgyi explained to Deadline in 2015, the WB TV head told the pair he “didn’t think the Red John story was sustaining. He felt that if we wanted to continue past season 6, we were going to have to close out the Red John arc and reinvent the show.”

This led to the aforementioned season 6 switch-up, in which Patrick Jane was recruited by the FBI and the show’s setting was moved from California to Texas. Far from being the reason for “The Mentalist” losing viewers, however, this change was actually an attempt to reinvigorate the show. However, it just wasn’t quite enough.

The big change in season 6 of “The Mentalist” didn’t exactly hurt the show, but it also failed to prompt a significant ratings bump. Season 5’s average rating was 11.82 million viewers, while season 6’s was 11.21 million. This likely contributed to CBS’s hesitation when it came to renewing the series for its seventh season. In May of 2014, “The Mentalist” did receive what would be its final green light in what Deadline called “an eleventh-hour renewal.” CBS ordered a shortened season, however, that would see just 13 new episodes produced. That particularly close-call was a portent of things to come.

In November of that same year, Deadline reported that the seventh season of “The Mentalist” would indeed be its last. The show wrapped up with a two-hour finale on February 18, 2015, though there was talk at the time of Warner Bros. TV shopping its still relatively popular series to other networks. However, none of that would ever come to fruition, and “The Mentalist” did indeed end after its seventh season.

After the show, Bruno Heller, no stranger to cancellations following the demise of “Rome” after two seasons back in 2007, went off to work on “Gotham” while Simon Baker took somewhat of a step back from the acting business. Meanwhile, “The Mentalist” was destined to become that show you’ve heard about but never seen (unless you’re French, apparently).