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Okay, I admit it. I’m a sucker for Simon Baker. Sexy, suave, a little dangerous, I just can’t get enough of the 39-year old Australian actor, no matter if the show is good or bad. (His wife is a lucky, lucky woman.)

So it’s not a surprise that I volunteered to review The Mentalist, his latest Prime Time effort Tuesday nights on CBS. I figured I could get some face time in with the hottie and hey, if the show was bad, it would likely get canceled. Pretty much everything else he is in does, even if it is good TV.

In the pilot, we meet Baker’s latest protagonist, Patrick Jane, a man who sees everything and deducts, like Holmes, motives, means and opportunity for crimes. He is one member of a team of investigators from the California Bureau of Investigation. The initial scene with Gail O’Grady as a grieving mother is nothing like the clips promise. It is short, with Jane coming off as a little cocky, too smooth - a puppeteer playing with his toys to get the desired effect. It does. He easily figures out that O’Grady’s on-screen husband murdered their daughter. She shoots him.

Jane is unrepentant. Justice has been served.

He is suspended for a week, but pulls strings to get assigned to a new Red John killing. Red John is a serial murderer who leaves a happy face on the walls of his victims, drawn in their blood. We discover later that Red John killed Jane’s wife and daughter after he tells a nationwide television audience that the killer is a cold, dark presence who a little fear of his own. Red John leaves a nice letter, using Jane’s words against him, on the door to the blood bath.

Jane easily discovers that this killing is a copycat and what ensues is a somewhat twisty investigation into the real whodunit.

The Mentalist offered a surprisingly strong pilot, with Baker the chameleon launching into a character a little different from others. He’s played a criminal bad boy in the short-lived Smith, and the troubled attorney in The Guardian, and everything in between. This character is different. It draws on his ability to be cocky, but the core of Patrick Jane is pain and rage at a killer who took what was most important to him. He is dark enough to manipulate situations, believing the ends justify the means. He is former blue collar con man who pretended to be psychic when in fact he just used his uncanny process of deduction to figure out what people needed to hear.

What sets this show apart from similar efforts like Criminal Minds, Law & Order Criminal Intent and Medium? Not much. Jane is a man on a mission: to find - and likely kill - Red John, the serial killer who murdered his family. He stands out from Ghost Whisperer and Medium because he is not selling psychic mumbo jumbo. He doesn’t believe there is an afterlife, and if he did, that belief vanished after the brutal slaying of his family. However, his obsession with a killer is similar to that of Women’s Murder Club‘s slip knot killer, and the CSI: Las Vegas miniature killer.

Jane’s disfunction is shown only to viewers at his home, where he sleeps on a mattress on the floor of the room where he found his murdered wife and daughter five years earlier. Red John’s signature bloody smiley face is still the only decoration. Creepy, yes. Original? No. But the strength of the episode came not just from good writing, but from great acting from Baker and the rest of the cast, and the burgeoning sexual tension between Jane and colleague Agent Teresea Lisbon (Robin Tunney). It offers a bit of comic relief, because it is so boy meets girl and throws dirt at her on the playground to show he likes her. Ensuing episodes will determine if the show has the stamina to stay in a market already flooded with anti-hero cop shows.

If you missed the pilot on Tuesday, its worth a look. Watch it at http://www.cbs.com/primetime/the_mentalist/

The Mentalist is every Tuesday after NCIS.

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