NBC's new show "The Listener" is about a paramedic who can read minds.
Really. I am not making this up.
Heck, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
It's hard not to imagine the pitch meeting for "The Listener," which is actually a Canadian production that NBC picked up. (It aired this spring on CTV.)
How many professions did they run through before they landed on paramedic?
How about a mind-reading grocer? Banker? Nurse? Teacher? Toll-booth attendant? Basketball player? Or even something really crazy, like a television critic?
No, that's just too weird and stupid.
Anyway, "The Listener" (8 and 9 p.m., Ch. 5) stars Craig Olejnik as Toby Logan, a handsome young paramedic who has been blessed/cursed with special abilities for as long as he can remember. As is the case with, oh, pretty much every show ever made about people with psychic abilities in general — and telepaths in particular — we're told just seconds into tonight's premiere that mind-reading is a burden.
"The secret isn't hearing people's thoughts. The secret is making it stop," Toby tells viewers.
But then the writers try to be clever. (The operative word here being "try.")
"Still, when God hooks you up with free cable, you've got to think he expects you to do a little surfing," Toby says.
Again, I am not making this up.
Our heroic paramedic thinks he's pretty much got all this under control. But as he and his partner/comic relief, Oz Bey (Ennis Esmer), are driving along, Toby is suddenly overwhelmed with someone else's thoughts. He sees a young woman who's been in a serious car accident and soon picks up on her thoughts.
It seems that she witnessed a crime, and her young son has been kidnapped.
Toby goes to talk to his longtime mentor, Dr. Ray Mercer (Colm Feore), one of the few people who know about his powers. And Mercer suggests that the intensity of the victim's emotions has turned Toby into a conduit of some sort — a "human fire alarm."
So Toby does what all mind-reading paramedics would do — he becomes a crime fighter. Not a bad choice, what with his ability to know whodunit without doing any actual investigation.
It's a lot easier than being, oh, smart. But it certainly doesn't make for good storytelling.
With the exception of the whole telepath thing, "The Listener" is a standard-issue crime show. Not only is there a police detective helping/butting heads with Toby — detective Charlie Marks (Lisa Marcos) — but he's got an ex-girlfriend who's an E.R. doctor — Olivia Fawcett (Mylene Dinh-Robic). And their feelings for each other haven't entirely died.
In addition to that, Toby has some deep, dark secrets about his childhood that he's just starting to remember.
Hoo, boy.
Not only is "The Listener" derivative as a cop show, but the mind-reader thing is hardly original. We've seen it — or something very much like it — in a wide variety of shows like "True Blood," "Medium," "Ghost Whisperer" and even "Star Trek: The Next Generation," just to name a few.
I know it's summer. And it's nice that NBC is actually offering us some original programming.
And licensing Canadian shows has worked before. CBS has done rather nicely with "Flashpoint."
But "The Listener," despite its attempts to be original, is just bad TV.
NBC premieres the show with back-to-back episodes tonight at 8 and 9. Beginning next week, single episodes will air Thursdays at 9 p.m.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com