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The Mentalist‘s Bruno Heller wants to fight for the underdog on CBS.
The creator of the Simon Baker starrer has landed a pilot production commitment for The Advocates, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The hourlong drama revolves around a female lawyer and a male ex-con who team as “victim advocates” and go to the edge of the law to right wrongs and fight for the underdog. Heller will write and executive produce the project for Warner Bros. Television.
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Advocates come as CBS is preparing to shift Mentalist from its three-season slot on Thursdays to a new home on Sundays for its fourth season. The series has proven a valuable asset to the network, drawing an early renewal last season.
Heller is repped by WME and Hansen Jacobson.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit
stuff, but my wife, whom I love dearly and I respect deeply, does believe in it. You can’t prove a negative. The show isn’t saying there’s no such thing as psychics, just that [Patrick Jane] wasn’t a real one and he’s never seen a real one. So in that sense we’re having our cake and eating it too.
THR: There’s a couple things I liked in the pilot that I haven’t seen since, or least not much of: The flashbacks to him being a sleazy charlatan. And the ending of the pilot — which I could easily imagine a network not liking — of Jane going to sleep on a mattress in the vacant home where his murdered family used to live. It raised the idea that this guy is much weirder and darker than we suspected.
Heller: I like both of those too. Seeing him in his original guise is lovely. But we can only go back there so often. We will go there, but sparingly. With the whole weird sensibility of his, it’s a question of threading that through a character who is on the surface a happy person and kind of graceful and light. The idea is to show that grace and lightness is an act of heroism; it’s not simple-minded happiness. It’s a conscious decision he is making to live his life positively. So where we draw the line at underlining that dark side is tricky. There are episodes coming up where that dark side of him will be featured much more strongly. But the notion of the show is not to be a bummer.
THR: We’ve seen about eight episodes so far. Are you happy with the show or are you looking to do “more of this, less of that,” in the future?
Heller: I’m not happy. I think we’re halfway there to what the show canbe. It’s not changing the proportions of anything. It’s a massivemachine. The end result is never quite what you want; you’recompromising and working things out as you go along. So the tuningnever stops. The reason the show has been successful is what Simonbrings to it. He’s a genuine pleasure to watch. It’s not that he’sdoing technical things. He just has that spark and we try to infuse theshow with that sensibility.
THR: When you show Jane winning so much money at blackjack andhypnotizing people to do what he wants, don’t you risk turning him into too much of a superman?
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