The Mentalist, season 1

Patrick Jane was a television psychic - cold reads, showmanship, a lucrative fraud - until he taunted a serial killer on air. Red John answered by leaving Jane's wife and daughter dead under his signature: a smiling face painted on the wall in blood. Five years on, Jane works as a consultant for the CBI, California's serious-crimes bureau, closing ordinary murders with the observational tricks that used to be his act.

The cases are the week's business - vineyards, cults, country clubs - and Jane treats each one as a puzzle he is openly better at than the badge-holders around him. Teresa Lisbon runs the unit and the uneasy bargain: Jane closes cases nobody else can, and she absorbs the lawsuits, the hypnotised witnesses, the confessions extracted by theatre. Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt round out a team that is learning when to look away.

The season is honest about what the job is for him. Every case is filler between chances at Red John, and when the killer surfaces - a copycat staged to draw Jane in, then a case that touches the real thing - the charm drops and something colder looks out.

It ends with the case that comes nearest home, and with Jane exactly where the pilot found him: patient, smiling, and waiting.