| 63 |
New York Post Linda Stasi
You don't have to be nuts to love Mental, which is a kind of schizophrenic "House"--but you do have to be willing to suspend disbelief to the point of, well, insanity. |
| 60 |
New York Daily News David Hinckley
Mental doesn't blow in with quite as fresh a breeze as "House." But it could get up into that division. |
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times Paige Wiser
Gallagher's played by Chris Vance ("Prison Break"), who tries to overcome the cheesy script with a British accent and a little dignity. He fails. |
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
Mental's plots are trite and secondary to establishing Gallagher as a policy-defying Brit who says ''Bang on!'' to express enthusiasm. |
| 42 |
Newsday Verne Gay
It is so numbingly derivative--effectively a dull mash-up of "House" and "Private Practice"--that you quickly forget it's also numbingly silly. But then, maybe that's the whole idea. |
| 40 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
If you're bereft without new episodes of "House" this summer and willing to settle for a pale imitation, there's always Fox's Mental. |
| 40 |
Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
It's a stubbornly mediocre product that really, really, really wants to be "House" in a hospital psych ward. |
| 40 |
The New Yorker Nancy Franklin
Mental, a new drama on Fox, starting May 26th, is solidly mediocre; it’s not good, it’s not terrible, and there’s no reason for it to exist. |
| 40 |
Washington Post Tom Shales
The parts of the show that don't seem recycled from previous medical dramas seem recycled from previous crime dramas, with just a few changes of vernacular and gadgetry. |
| 40 |
Newark Star-Ledger Alan Sepinwall
Mental was produced on a relative shoestring by Fox Telecolombia, and there's a flatness not only to the sets (which look not unlike what you might see on a Univision show), but the dialogue and characterizations. |
| 40 |
Philadelphia Daily News Ellen Gray
As TV dramas go, Mental is far from unwatchable. But unless you're spending the summer without cable, it's also probably unnecessary. |
| 30 |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Jack delivers to every brilliant-offbeat doctor expectation, which means that for all his hyper-performative charms, Jack is also tedious, right down to the zipper in his forehead that marks commercial breaks. |
| 30 |
Variety Brian Lowry
Despite some nebulous personal baggage involving a mysterious woman from his past, the character's simply not interesting enough to carry the show virtually alone. |
| 30 |
Wall Street Journal Michael Judge
An early scene from this Tuesday’s premier of the new Fox series Mental, a drama about a psychiatric ward in a fictional Los Angeles hospital, is representative of the larger problems that plague this ill-conceived show. |
| 30 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
The creators of Mental couldn’t take Gallagher any further up the mean-spirited scale, so instead they went too far in the other direction and ran smack into cliché. |
| 30 |
Hollywood Reporter Randee Dawn
Ultimately, the problem is that while someone's used considerable brain power to put all these pieces together, they clearly just haven't thought things through. |
| 30 |
Los Angeles Times Mary McNamara
If Mental sounds a lot like "House" or "The Mentalist" or whatever other foreign-born-actor-playing-a-haunted-man drama you can think of, well, it is. Only nowhere near as good. |
| 30 |
Miami Herald Glenn Garvin
On Tuesday night, we're going to see if you can get it from television, with three shows that--intentionally or otherwise--document seriously disturbed minds, with results ranging from riveting to revolting. Tending toward the latter is Mental. |
