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This fall, BOP takes a look at every new show from the five broadcast networks. Armed with some strong coffee and our beloved TiVo, we'll slough through the entire slate of freshman dramas and comedies, weeding through the trash to find the new shows that are (surprise, surprise!) actually worth your time and energy.

This week on Watch What We Say: From CBS, The (pompous, pseudo-psychic) Mentalist and Gary, Unmarried

Watching CBS is the dining equivalent to eating dinner at McDonalds: you know exactly what you're going to get, even before you get it. Huge PR efforts may proclaim that there's something supposedly "BRAND NEW! TOTALLY COOL! YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THIS FROM MCDONALDS!" but nonetheless, you can pretty much predict how the "new" product is going to taste even before you bite into your first morsel of waistline-enlarging, artery-clogging, pimple-inducing, fatty goodness.

Now, I'm not saying that CBS is bad for you. I'm not saying that watching CBS will give you a heart attack (lord knows that the stereotypical CBS viewer has enough trouble with heart attacks already). I'm simply saying that CBS's repetitive strategy of filling their primetime slate with carbon-copies of existing TV hits has created an environment in which most every night of programming comes complete with a "been there, done that" sensibility.

This redundancy strategy has clearly been successful for CBS. Each year, CBS boasts the lowest failure rate for new shows. But for this BOP writer, who's spent the last three weeks watching new programming from all five broadcast networks, this strategy gets a little boring after a while.

We start with The Mentalist, CBS's blatant rip-off of the quirky, likable comedy "Psych" from USA Networks. This new version follows androgynously-named Patrick Jane, a private investigator who used to masquerade as a psychic spirit communicator. Five years ago, Jane's wife and child were slaughtered by a mysterious serial killer named Red John and now Jane uses his powers for good to help the police apprehend criminals.

So what does Jane contribute to investigations? In his own words, Jane "pays attention to the details." Basically, he employs all of the tricks of the trade that he learned while working as a fake psychic (body language analysis, visual cues, supreme powers of deduction, etc.) to ferret out secrets that no one else in the room notices.

The problem with this is that the show rarely, if ever, points out the clues that lead Jane to his boastful proclamations. As a single example of what takes place multiple times during the show, during the questioning of one suspect, Jane watches for less than a moment before whispering smugly to his colleague, "He and Alison were lovers." Not two seconds later does the suspect confess, "Me and Alison were lovers." There's no explanation, no insight, no reasoning to Jane's correct guess. It's just a single, snidely-given assertion followed instantly by confirmation.

For me, this eventually resulted in fervent hatred and abhorrence of the character of Patrick Jane. It's not so much what he does on the show but how he does it. I understand and I accept that this guy is smart. Fine, no problems with that. But does he have to be so arrogant about it? Does he always have to be showing off? Does he have to deliver every revelation with a pretentious smirk? At one point, he tells another character, "I hate talking with doctors because they always want to be the smartest person in the room . . . when clearly that's me."

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