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wclements@globeandmail.com

Television makes a good living by blurring the line between skill and magic.

Consider CSI and its off-shoots, where writers transform the hard slog of forensics into the miracle of instantaneous results. Somebody left the faint imprint of a corkscrew at a crime scene? Within minutes, the forensics team has identified the one store where the corkscrew could have been sold and has enhanced a distant whisper heard on a surveillance video to point directly to the guy who bought it. Presto! The folks behind The Mentalist, on the other hand, a superior police procedural, go out of their way to pooh-pooh the magic and salute the skill.

The back story is that Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), a popular stage psychic, denounced his own act as a fraud after his wife and child were murdered by a serial killer named Red John. Now he helps the police - in particular senior agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) - by using his skills of observation and analysis to pry the truth from suspects unwilling to disclose it. If the spectre of a certain English consulting detective springs to mind, executive producer Bruno Heller acknowledges the debt in the extras on The Mentalist: The Complete First Season (2008-09), describing Lisbon as the Watson to Jane's Sherlock Holmes.

Yet for all the insistence on skill, Jane's deductions have a magical air to them. He dispenses them with a showman's glee whenever the plot demands. Creator Heller calls him a "trickster hero" and compares him to Brer Rabbit. Baker's performance emphasizes this otherworldly air with a wide grin and a mischievous twinkle that might, to the unwary, suggest boundless happiness. In fact, as Jane notes on more than one occasion, he looks forward to the day when he can find and eviscerate Red John. Everything else is foreplay. "The more vague you are about the depth and the darkness of the character," Baker notes in the bonus features, "the more longevity the character has."

There is a full-on embrace of paranormal powers in The Ghost Whisperer: The Fourth Season (2008-09). Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose costume choices suggest that spirits may be attracted to cleavage, plays Melinda, a newlywed who can see and communicate with the dead. This device pays two dramatic dividends: a shiver whenever a spirit appears, and a mystery that must be solved. Why is the spirit unhappy? What can Melinda do to set the apparition at rest? And can CBC-TV's daily reruns of this show help the network commune with its moribund budget? Expect a bit of soul transference in Season 4. I'll say no more.

The paranormal certainly underlies the engaging comedy-drama Being Erica: Season One (2008-09). A mysterious therapist named Dr. Tom (Michael Riley) addresses the misery of 32-year-old Torontonian Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk) by sending her into the past to relive and possibly revise all the bad choices she made, the way Kathleen Turner shot back to her school days in Peggy Sue Got Married while still looking like Kathleen Turner. Dr. Tom appears in the past to speak with Erica, the way the hologram of Dean Stockwell's character appeared to Scott Bakula whenever Bakula's character lived someone else's past life in Quantum Leap. Spooky. They're not just reliving the past; they're reliving past entertainments.

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MORE DVD RELEASES

TV

Ugly Betty: The Complete Third Season (2008-09)

The sitcom is set in New York but was filmed in Los Angeles until Season 3, when the production moved to NYC and viewers could see Betty Suarez (America Ferrara) really stroll outside her family's house in Queens. But the real fun remains at the office of Mode magazine, where wicked Wilhelmina (Vanessa Williams) rides herd and her sycophantic assistant Mark and his pal Amanda speak a barbed language all their own. It's rumoured Betty's braces will finally be removed from her teeth in Season 4.

Castle: The Complete First Season (2008-09)

Enter another police procedural with a rule-breaking male outsider trading wits with a female by-the-book cop as they investigate one bloody murder after another. The man is a wealthy crime novelist, Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion), who hungers for new material. The woman is a New York homicide detective, Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), whose mother was murdered and who doesn't want Castle to raise the subject. Toss in Castle's actress mother and his precocious daughter, add corpses, sprinkle with banter and stir.

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MOVIES

Easy Virtue (2008)

This game of cat and mouse, based on a melodrama by Noel Coward, takes liberties with Coward's plot but deals with the same elements of social intolerance. Young John (Ben Barnes) returns to his 1920s family home with new bride Larita (Jessica Biel), an American widow with secrets. John's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) promptly chips away at John's love of and respect for his wife. Stephan Elliott directs, which makes a change from the fellow who directed a silent version in 1928: Alfred Hitchcock.

O'Horten (2007)

The title character, a pipe-smoking Norwegian named Odd Horten (Bard Owe), is about to retire from his railway job, but he misses his last run from Oslo to Bergen. This is his cue to embark on a dream-like odyssey where strange things happen and curious people cross his path. The Globe gave the film three stars, compared Owe to Buster Keaton and called Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer "a filmmaker with a deadpan sense of humour and a gift for metaphor."

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BLU-RAY

Observe and Report (2009)

Security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is one very disturbed dude. That he is the hero of this dark film indicates the territory is far closer to The Cable Guy than to a standard-issue comedy. Ronnie wants desperately to be a real cop. When a flasher annoys folks at his mall, including the cosmetics-counter cutie (Anna Faris) Ronnie longs for, the guard struggles to catch the guy before a real cop (Ray Liotta) can. The Globe gave the film two stars, though it noted its anti-commercial courage.

Star Trek IV:

The Voyage Home (1986)

Of all the films based on the original Star Trek series, this is the most entertaining, even if it doesn't boast Ricardo Montalban as a villain (that's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). The time-travel story deals with conservation, humpback whales and a force bent on destroying Earth, but at heart it's a comedy. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy, who also directed) and the crew loosen their stays and, in Spock's case, use the Vulcan pinch on a bus rider who won't turn off his boom box.