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Quickly now, name the TV series that features a somewhat damaged or socially maladjusted genius who employs unique knowledge and perspective to help a law enforcement agent solve crime on a weekly basis? It’s obviously a trick question, as this setup has become one of television’s favorite modern formats. To the ranks of Sherlock Holmes, Adrian Monk, and Temperance Brennan (among others), we can now add Dr. Daniel Pierce, the schizophrenic neuroscience professor snarking his way through TNT’s Perception.
Eric McCormack stars as Pierce, whose insight into the human mind is somewhat offset by his tendency to hallucinate people and events. Rachael Leigh Cook co-stars as FBI agent Kate Moretti, a former student of Pierce’s who returns to Chicago to request his help on a case. Once he gets a taste, Pierce can’t resist the thrill of solving these kinds of human puzzles, even as the disruption of his carefully ordered routines exacerbates his condition.
Perception relies pretty heavily on its own routines as well, employing a pair of familiar TV devices. Each episode is bookended by one of Pierce’s lectures, providing brief commentary on the story’s theme. It works better in the early episodes, as we’re still getting to know the professor, but it could be dropped at any time.
Then there are the hallucinations. As expected, many of them are reflections of Pierce’s problem-solving—a way to dramatize his thought process and internal state, occasionally leaning into the absurd for a little levity. But there’s an edge to how the show employs these visions, beginning with a nicely handled reveal in the pilot and reaching a crescendo in the season’s penultimate episode. Despite being mostly functional, Daniel Pierce is not a well man, and it’s to the show’s benefit that it never lets us forget that.
With the hallucinations in the foreground this way, it’s not surprising that some of the “real” character relationships seem a bit underdeveloped. Cook’s Agent Moretti falls shortest, despite having the most screen time. At the end of the first season, I still didn’t have much of a grasp on the character, other than a generic professionalism and unnecessary shadings of unresolved romantic tension between her and her former teacher. Arjay Smith fares better as Pierce’s live-in assistant/reality check, Max Lewicki, while Kelly Rowan gives the strongest showing as Natalie, whose relationship with the professor is a bit more complicated.
This type of show tends to ride on the central performance, though, and while McCormack doesn’t put his competition on notice, he keeps thing running nicely. Daniel Pierce isn’t as acerbic as Dr. House or as twitchy as Monk, but there’s still plenty of scenery to chew. Amid the hallucinations and paranoid rants, it would be easy to lose sight of the character in a caricature, but he steers clear most of the time.
Being the new guy in a crowded genre—and with more likely to come—Perception gets off to a respectable start. Whether it can grow beyond its middle-of-the-field sensibility will determine how long it gets to stick around.
DVD Review:
The first season of Perception is available in a pretty bare-bones DVD edition. There are ten episodes spread over two discs, a couple of advertisements, and that’s it.
