The Irrational: Jesse L. Martin Carries A Familiar Storyline

 

From the moment I first saw him play Dr. Greg Butters on Ally McBeal, I have been one of Jesse L. Martin’s biggest fans.  Handsome but not drop dead gorgeous, calm but with a steel trap beneath him waiting to snap Martin has always been one of the great draws of network television in this century.

For much of the last twenty years his most famous roles were two very different detectives. He played the often hot-headed Ed Green in Law & Order’s second decade on the air and brought an edge to it that had been missing since Chris Noth had left the show five years earlier.  His run on the series was one of the longest of any actor in the first twenty years: he lasted more than seven and a half seasons. After a brief stint on Smash (in which he got to use his Broadway talents) he landed on his nest major series The Flash as Detective Joe West, Barry Allen’s surrogate father and the resident adult who shows up on most of the Arrow-verse showed. Martin’s detective was a milder version of the one he’d played on Law & Order, in a sense the audience surrogate trying to keep up with the paranormal.

It’s actually strange that in his nearly quarter of a century in television Martin has never been cast to lead a show until this year. He plays behavioral scientist Alec Mercer on The Irrational. The format, I must admit, is one that you kind of see only network television these days, more because it seems original when its really little more than a variation on the procedural network TV keeps churning out. I imagine those who have a history with these things will be inclined to remember Lie To Me in which Tim Roth essentially played a character who the government called in to see if people were lying. Mercer is not that much far removed from that character – and honestly that character was not that much removed from Gregory House.  And the common thread between all three shows is that it features a lead trying to deal with the human condition who has a distinct scientific detachment from humanity as a species. House very quickly grew tiresome the longer it was on the air and Lie to Me barely lasted three seasons.

It helps matters that, where the leads in the earlier series were fundamentally unlikable almost from the start, Mercer while having the same abrasive nature as Hugh Laurie and Tim Roth, is more likable than either of those two leads. Furthermore while neither of those two men could handle basic human interaction for an entire scene, Mercer is able to do the same, even though at times he is incredulous that human beings don’t work like science experiments.  Alex also clearly has human connections beyond the professional: he is currently separate from his ex-wife Marisa (Maahra Hill) though he seems to be in denial about that fact. It doesn’t help matters that she’s an FBI agent and the two of them are almost perpetually in consult. His other major connection is his sister Kylie (Travina Springer) which helps the show more.  Kylie has the ability that all siblings have to deflate your ego, call you on your bullshit and yet be supportive of you. Both women will listen to Alec’s theories with patience and will be just as quick to call him an idiot.  This is already a huge advantage over the earlier two shows where in both case the major female characters were either potential romantic interests or students hoping to learn.

To be clear, as in those previous shows Alec does have his own team, though right now there are only two major members: Owen, a relative newcomer and Phoebe whose been with him long enough to understand him. Still The Irrational is already superior to both those shows as Alec’s tends to listen more to his teams suggestions than Lightman or House did without some kind of berating or mocking.  Indeed that actually one of the things I already like about the show: most of the humor is directed towards Mercer and he actually seems to regard it with geniality.

Mercer is called in on case because he is a student of human behavior and he is very good at figuring out why the rational mind can often to irrational things. In a weird way, The Irrational is educational in a way the other series weren’t; the show is willing to show experiments as to why we intend to be influenced the way we usually are, that we are more suggestible that we tend to believe and that a lot of time we can’t see what’s in plain sight. This particularly came clear in an episode last night when Mercer showed a woman to keep her eye on how many times a ball was thrown – and didn’t notice that a man in a bear suit had walked right through.  There was a fair amount of science in the previous two series but most of it was completely over the viewer’s head to begin with.

And Mercer for all his genius about the human psyche can be monumentally stupid.  Called to make a meeting in a marina when gunshots rang out, he attempted to stop the gunman from firing by telling him that there were perfectly logical reasons for him to leave and not kill him. Mercer seemed genuinely surprised that the man kept firing. In the first scene of the series, Mercer comes in and tells a man who has taken a woman hostage that his demand for a helicopter will be met, but that he has to think through what will happen once he gets it.  The gunmen unravels but eventually surrenders. When Marina demands to know what he was thinking, Mercer calmly tells her that he was using a technique that works ninety-five percent of the time. In the major story in that episode, he tries that exact method in front of a man who has a gun pointed at him – and nearly finds out what happens the other five percent of the time.

I don’t think The Irrational would work at all if Martin wasn’t the lead.  Martin has spent so much of his career balancing between the hotheaded and cool-headed so efficiently that I can’t see any other acting managing to pull this off – certainly Tim Roth and Hugh Laurie would be all wrong for it (though maybe if both men used their actual accents).  The stories are interesting, at least so far, but there’s nothing that revolutionary about any of them at least so far. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen variations on the mystery at the center of the first two episodes on Law and Order.) But Martin has enough charisma as well as the ability to somehow seems slightly uncomfortable in his own skin for me to find it appealing enough to keep watching.

I must admit I’m weary about the potential mythology part of this. One of the concepts that makes Mercer interesting is that when he was 22 he survived the bombing of a church that left twenty of his friends dead and him with burns across his body that have left visible scars. He tells us how those scars happened in the pilot but he has been deceiving his classes for a while. It’s also how he first met Marina and it’s clear everything about their relationship before and after unfolded this way. Mercer was never able to remember what happened the night of the bombing and because so much of his life is based around observation it has haunted him.

This in itself is enough to make the character interesting and I’m starting to genuinely tire of TV shows that have decided to make a character’s trauma essentially part of a mythology of the show rather than just being undiscussed.  Because that’s exactly what happens at the end of the Pilot. Mercer goes to the bomber’s parole hearing with the intention of making a victim impact statement because he wants the man to stay behind bars. The bomber says all the right things, then looks to his left and says: “If you let me out, I’ll probably bomb three or four more churches.” So naturally Mercer and Marina  run to the courthouse steps and of course a van is pulling out. Of course the most seminal event in the protagonist’s life was part of a larger conspiracy.   People who say they hate the trauma plot when it comes to characters should see the trauma plot being used as a piece to a mythology. It turned me off Found very quickly and even though that story was resolved by the end of the season, it was enough for me not to watch the show after four episodes. I am similarly worried about where The Irrational will take this.

I will not dismiss The Irrational out of hand. Admittedly that is because the strikes in Hollywood have done much to make the pickings for the fall season incredibly slim and there are few options. The science is interesting and Martin is genuinely superb. I will no doubt stick with it until it goes on its fall hiatus. After that, well, let’s just say I’m not capable of making a rational decision on it yet.

My score: 3.5 stars.