TV is the New Reading

‘The Listener’ is worth a look

‘The Listener’ is worth a look

There’s more flash than story, but it’s
the television equivalent of beach reading

“If God hooks you up with free cable, he probably expects you to surf.”

That’s the rationalization Toby Logan sets on his ability to read minds.

Why can he read minds? No one knows. He gets some assistance from a psychiatrist, Ray Mercer, who is the only one who knows he can. Otherwise, he and his best friend zip around town as emergency medical technicians and ...

Er ... I’m not certain how I can just zip past the fact that he can read minds. Really. Can read your mind. Just, it seems, the stuff you’re randomly thinking about offhand -- I don’t know if it goes much deeper than that, or if he can ... I don’t know, stare intently, perhaps, at someone’s head, maybe, and ... rummage around in their thoughts ...

If that’s even how this would work. It seemed at first like he was overwhelmed with the sounds of every random, passing thought from everyone, and then he learned, early on, how to shut them out.

Because that’s likely to be the first problem, right? If you’re in a room where everyone’s talking it’s hard enough to concentrate, and in this case you’d have the conversations and you’d have the inner monologues of everyone hanging around, even if you didn’t want to read their thoughts (and presumably they’d like to keep them private, too).

But that’s what he does. He’s a telepath. He reads minds.

Last week’s pilot episode introduced Craig Olejnik as Logan, an EMT-in-training with tousled hair and haunting eyes -- yes, the young, beautiful, 20-something aspect of this summer show has not been overlooked in this age of “Twilight” -- bopping around Toronto saving lives and solving mysteries.

As the pilot episode began he had to track a police officer who was witnessed killing his own partner by a young single mom, who the corrupt police officer then ran off the road, flipping her SUV and kidnapping her son.

Meanwhile, Lisa Marcos as the beautiful police detective Charlie Marks is suspicious of Logan when the young single mom gets up from her hospital bed and makes a run for it after he talks to her, and then he has to track the young single mom and her son and the kidnapping partner-killing police officer to the kidnapping partner-killing police officer’s lake cabin ...

OK, in all of this, there were a few means by which his telepathy advanced the plot. The young woman didn’t want anyone to know her son had been kidnapped, and the kidnap-ping partner-killing police officer’s neighbor wouldn’t have told Logan where the lake cabin was on his own. Also, the partner-killing police officer wouldn’t have confessed to killing his partner, so he needed the telepathy for that.

But he also needed to make it all seem like it just came to him, because he didn’t want anyone else to know that he could ...

Mind-reading?

Really, how does this mind-reading thing work? Not that it does at all, of course, but at least in the NBC production of “Heroes” there’s some reason given as to why Matt Parkman can read people’s minds, and  viewers accept that Allison Dubois can read minds in the recently closed NBC production of “Medium.” This Logan guy, growing up never knowing his parents, coming to terms with his gift around the age of 6, and only once confiding in anyone about it ...

... well, I don’t have any better insight on why Logan can read minds than I do as to why a touch from Ned the Piemaker brings dead things back to life in “Pushing Daisies” -- which, incidentally, closes out its second and final season with an exciting finale Saturday at 9 p.m. on ABC -- but I’ve enjoyed that show for years, too, so ... Logan is a young man who can read minds, effortlessly, and he uses this ability he’s gotten from -- he says God -- to “channel surf” and save some lives along the way.

I suppose it’s like asking someone in the Trekverse how the Heisenberg compensators work on the teleporters: “Very well, thank you.”

Writing and acting-wise,  I like the buddy chemistry with his best friend, Oz, a fellow EMT who also doesn’t know about Logan’s ability. I like that more than the chemistry Logan has with his ex-girlfriend, Olivia, a young doctor where he works. I didn’t get the sense anything had ever happened between the two of them. In fact, during the second episode, when a young blond firefighter started hitting on her, the firefighter had more chemistry with Logan than he did with Olivia. But to be fair, I think they were just trying to establish a sort of “Third Watch” type vibe between the young doctors, EMTs and firefighter, and I imagine we’ll see him again.

The show itself is almost exactly as compelling as “Flashpoint,” another Canadian production, and one which I don’t watch. That being said, the characters in “The Listener” are way more engaging, and as summer shows go, it’s palatably written and reasonably entertaining.

“The Listener” airs 9 p.m. Thursdays on NBC.