When Does The Mentalist Season 8 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is The Mentalist about?

Patrick Jane is a fraud who knows he's a fraud, and that self-awareness is what makes The Mentalist worth watching. Simon Baker plays the former celebrity psychic turned CBI consultant with a loose, almost theatrical charm, someone who can walk into a room full of suspects and dismantle each of them in under five minutes through observation and psychology alone. The show's central pleasure is watching him do exactly that, week after week, with a smirk and a cup of tea.

Bruno Heller built the series around a procedural frame that it wears fairly lightly. The real engine is Baker's performance, which keeps Jane sympathetic despite the character's relentless manipulation of everyone around him, including his colleagues. Robin Tunney's Lisbon provides a necessary counterweight, though the show sometimes reduces her to a disapproving presence rather than fully using her. The Red John serial killer thread running through the early seasons gives the whole thing a darker undertow that the breezy case-of-the-week format occasionally struggles to hold.

Critics found it slick and entertaining without being especially challenging. Audiences loved it. It ran for seven seasons on CBS and drew consistent ratings, which is its own kind of verdict. The show's reputation sits somewhere between comfort television and something sharper, depending on which season you're watching. The Red John arc divided viewers when it finally resolved, and the later seasons shifted tone considerably after that storyline concluded.

What stays with you is less any particular mystery and more Baker's physical ease in the role. He made Jane's particular brand of showmanship look effortless, which is probably harder than it looks.

Created by Bruno Heller

Is The Mentalist renewed or cancelled?

Why did The Mentalist end?

The Mentalist ran for seven seasons on CBS, which by any measure is a full and successful life for a network drama. The show never really struggled to find an audience in its early years. At its peak it was pulling in well over 15 million viewers, making Patrick Jane one of the more watchable characters on broadcast television in the late 2000s. But like most procedurals of that era, it shed viewers gradually as the decade turned, and by season six the numbers had dropped considerably from those highs.

What makes The Mentalist's ending relatively clean, though, is that the show had a long-running serialized thread that was always going to need a resolution. The hunt for Red John, the mysterious serial killer who murdered Patrick Jane's family, defined the series from the pilot onward. CBS and creator Bruno Heller let that storyline conclude in the season six midseason finale, which effectively answered the central question the show had been asking for years. What followed was essentially a coda, with Jane and Lisbon's relationship finally resolved. By the time season seven arrived, it was a short, 13-episode final run that felt intentional rather than abrupt.

So this was an ending rather than a cancellation, but the ratings decline probably influenced how CBS and the producers shaped that exit. A show in its seventh season with declining numbers and its main narrative already resolved has a natural stopping point. There was no dramatic axe, just a mutual recognition that the story had been told.

The Mentalist Season 8 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

The Mentalist seasons

The Mentalist trailer

Where to watch The Mentalist

HulustreamAmazon VideobuyApple TV StorebuyGoogle Play MoviesbuyFandango At Homebuy

The Mentalist latest news