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Whilst there are certainly many psychics who genuinely believe they are psychic, most of them are doing a kind of complex theatrical shtick, charlatans in other words, but at the same time, the good ones are performing the same kind of functions as good psychoanalysts and good priests, and good doctors and you know, good counsellors. Obviously some of them are just there to rip people off, but that’s true of any kind of profession like that. So there was this great kind of ambivalence about that world, if you’re a good mentalist, which is the sort of founding skills of psychic readings and stuff, if you’re a good mentalist then you have great empathy for people and great understanding and great intelligence, and the gift of the gab, and you have to have charm and people have to like you, and people want to have to confide in you, but at the same time you’re lying to them in order to make your living, but helping them at the same time.

 

So for a TV character, it makes it much more interesting if there’s some core contradiction in the character, so looking into that world and realising that a lot of the skills of a mentalist are the same kind of skills that a detective employs, you know, observation, cold-reading, a really kind of sharp and predatory understanding of human nature, human psychology - mentalists and detectives share those skills. And then once I got into reading mentalist literature, the actual techniques they employ are great fun and would translate beautifully to TV, and then it was simply a question of alright, how do you take this essentially roguish charlatan character, and put him in a procedural where he is working for good – hence, the back-story and everything else that follows.

 

But, really I have to say that the initial idea turned out to be a good one, but the real spark of the show, what really made it work is Simon. Because what the show requires, and it was always clear that it did require that, even in the first discussions with Warner Brothers, it had to be either a star of great charisma, or someone who was not a star, who hadn’t been discovered, who had that charisma in them, and that grace. In Simon Baker, we have an extremely graceful and talented actor, who exudes a joie de vivre and a sort of spirit and positivity and joy – that in itself, regardless of scripts and stories and production value, is an amazing real quality that comes across to audiences, and that’s essentially what makes the show work, and what makes it popular. The character can be a bastard, and the character can be obtrusive and mean and insolent and disruptive, and in order to do that, he has to be charming nonetheless, he has to have a sort of overpowering attractiveness, that you want to be in the room with him anyway. And to a degree, that’s that TV is on some level, you’re watching other people, so you want them to be interesting and attractive, and charming and welcoming. And Baker had that in spades, and immediately, because he is someone with that charm and that handsomeness and beauty even. But you know, he has his own demons and his own dark side, so he immediately related to the character, and we had to have very little horse-trading about who the character was, or how to portray him, because he immediately got it.

 

Yeah, and I think that’s true of all, not just characters, actors, you know, fictional characters, it’s very hard to sustain interest in someone who is unrelentingly good, because we kind of recognise that without really knowing why that’s not real, no-one is like that, you can’t look into the lives of the greatest saints without finding dark shadows and ambivalence.

 

Yeah exactly. She’s a very good example, someone who had lost all her faith, but had enough kind of, love left in her soul, that she still operated, for good or ill, the way she always had, because she knew that it was more important to carry on doing what she was doing, than to lay out that loss of faith - which is a kind of courage. And that courage, that same courage is in the character of Patrick Jane, that willingness to go on and make the best of life, although to some degree he feels that his life is over. That’s where the heroism of the character is, and that’s why he can do terrible things, or very kind of morally ambiguous things, because his heroism is not in his virtue, it’s in his willingness to persevere, and his willingness to carry on, and his determination not to let anyone see that he is suffering.

 

Absolutely. And I think, for lack of a more coherent religious principle in my life, that would be it. That we’re here anyway, whether we like it or not, and life does go on, so you might as well carry on with humour and life and positivity, because you know, the alternative is not better.

 

Not intimidating. Daunting? Yes, daunting, yes just because it’s like when you start telling someone an extremely long joke, you better make sure the punch line is funny, because you’re going to end up with egg on your face if it’s not. But I wouldn’t say daunting, it’s like I’m aware, we’re all aware that has to be a satisfying and coherent and convincing solution to this long detective story, but no, I love the challenge. A lot of story-telling is kind of, not quite vamping, and shtick sounds dismissive of it, but you’re doing a kind of performance that you can roll along - you know, Baker could entertain you with the phonebook for half an hour, and I could write that phonebook quite easily.

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Yeah, that relationship is and is meant to be a kind of, well, Rorschach Test would be wrong, but it stays in an ambivalent area because, it's not necessarily important, but I like that the audience is never quite sure, as those two are never quite sure where the relationship might go. And it's been growing in real time over the course of the five years of the show, and again that's one of those things that I think is very important to a show, to reflect the genuine passing of time in the character's life but also in the actors' lives. As Simon Baker and Robin have been working together for five years now and have grown very close and are very good friends, and have a great deal of affection for each other, that has increasingly come through, and you know again that's one of those things, like, in a movie or with a cable show, you can work against the natural slope of a character, the natural course of events if you see what I mean. On a network TV show it's important to work with where the actors, and their relationship with each other is actually going, and how they feel about each other. So it would be foolish to build animosity between them, when in fact what you can catch on screen in a beautiful way, is two people who have a telepathy between them and have great affection for each other and are amused by each other and exasperated by each other at times. All of those things are real things that happen to any two people who are working together that long in that kind of intimate situation, and that's what people see on the screen.

 

At the same time, some people think they’re secretly in love with each other, some people are horrified by that thought. And, you know, it's a brother and sister relationship and it can't possibly go that way. But, in truth, it's like life, if they find each other in the future, it will be a wonderful, inevitable surprise to them. Or, if they remain good friends, and colleagues, that is also natural. It's really about letting that relationship flow as opposed to coming up with story ideas for it and, you know "how can we", which is not to say we don't tweak it occasionally. I mean, from a male writer's point of view it's very hard not to fall in love with Robin Tunney as an actress and a character, so inevitably, as time rolls on, more of that affection appears in the scripts and on the screen, but who knows, who knows where it will go? I think, speaking as the characters, they're too deeply into what they're doing, and the journey they're on, to be able to step back and look at their relationship. I think it would be very scary for them to do that. And you know, they will do that, in the future, but that's for the future.

 

Yeah, but the little subtle things are you know – there’s a moment in the last episode of the last season, he says "I love you” to her. Well, you know, I say "I love you” to all sorts of unlikely people, you know, grips on the set, and I’d hate for them to think that I really did harbour deep sexual feelings for them. But at the same time, if you’re involved in that kind of intimate and emotional relationship, when someone says that, naturally Lisbon is thinking "Did he really mean that?” But both of them as characters, they’re both in many ways emotionally shut down – it’s very clear why Jane is shut down, Lisbon has her own demons and her own problems, and that’s why she’s a policewoman and why she buries herself in her work, and she’s not always out there dating every week.

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Frankly, the genesis of that story is, we were about midway through the whole arc of the show, you know, if we ran 7 seasons, knocking on wood we went that long, it’s kind of the end of the first act, and it was very important to bring the story back to Red John which we always try and do for those climactic episodes. And bring it back in a spectacular way that nevertheless did not, you know, we could not harpoon the whale in the end of season 3, because then we’re eating whale-meat for 4 seasons, and blubber ain’t that delicious really. So frankly, yes I’m confessing to, it’s not a sin, but it’s giving the audience what they want whilst denying them the last bite of pie. So then it becomes a kind of technical challenge, as a writer I desperately want to be able to write that scene of Jane sitting opposite Red John, but can’t do that without getting into all kinds of elaborate story shenanigans that I don’t want to go to.

 

So that was the genesis of the idea, and it’s also part of, as we learn more and more about Red John, what that story told us is how diabolically clever he is, and how much power he has, and how many people have fallen under his spell, which means that as the story rolls on, you never know who might be on the wrong side, you never know who Red John might be. It keeps the tension of that character who you can never see, it keeps him present and keeps the suspense of that situation rolling.

 

And it also gave us the chance to work with a brilliant actor in a bravura role, I’m speaking of Bradley Whitford. Again, because you can’t go to Red John, it’s wonderful to be able to write a character who’s at least pretending to be Red John, because villains are always fun to write.

 

Yeah, and he has great intelligence, but it’s not over-powering or kind of menacing, he just seems like a regular guy who could slip under the radar, but still with enough power and juice in him, that when he turns it on, you go "oh yeah that guy, he’s got a real dark side to him”. And he’s also, like Baker, he’s someone who comes alive in the moment, in an improv and just sparking off other actors, so it was very much designed as something to not just give the audience a little jazz, but to give Baker someone great to play off in that role.

 

This season, speaking of that sort of longer arc and the frame of the whole show, now we’re moving into the final act of the show, and over the course of this season, in quite rapid order, we will learn a great deal more about Red John, we will get several steps closer to him. So by the end of this season, the audience is, not to backtrack here but like I say up to now has been, in terms of the Red John story, not preamble but we’ve been hunting for the whale in a vast ocean. We know we have a much smaller ocean to cover, we know where he is, we know much more about him, and I’m being a little incoherent here because I’m trying to explain without giving anything away. But those people who have followed the Red John story, as opposed to the standalone mysteries every week are going to be very happy and pleased with this season, because truths will be revealed, shocking and suspenseful truths will be revealed.

 

I am amazed by the overwhelming power of luck in anyone’s life. It’s a great blessing, but very much something that happened by chance, and I take it as that, everyone who works on the show is very grateful and happy that it’s a success, and like I say in this business in particular, you can spend a lifetime doing great work and never get the chance to do a hundred episodes of a show. So I am extremely grateful to Warner Brothers and Peter Roth for giving me the chance, and I’m extremely grateful to Simon Baker for making it come to life, and I’m extremely grateful to the audiences for sticking with the show and seeming to like it.