The Guardian’s theme song. It grows on you. Like the show.

I tried to watch the popular TV series The Mentalist. Slick, superficial, inane. The Aussie star struck me as gay.

Today seems to be my day for confessing failures. I was wrong about the Aussie star. His name is Simon Baker. Beautiful wife and three kids. (Gaydar fail. Sigh.) When I was surfing Netflix for Midsomer Murders replacements, I stumbled across a three year major network series called “The Guardian,” which ran from 2001 to 2004.

Watched the pilot. Not too impressed. A pricey corporate lawyer in Pittsburgh gets busted for cocaine and is sentenced to divide his time between his father’s law firm and 1500 hours with the child services department of the city’s welfare system. Yawn. Fish out of water stuff. Silver spoon kid seeing real people problems for the first time.

A bit too transparent, you know. The name of the lead character is Nick Fallin (get it?), and he is so remote and without reaction that you might think he’s just a pretty boy coasting through a TV gig. Everybody rightly denounces him as arrogant, superior, and beyond the pale.

Don’t know why but after a long pause (desperation probably) I went back and watched a couple more episodes. Okay. I’ve strung it out long enough. This is a GREAT American TV series. Simon Baker is a gifted actor, wasted in The Mentalist.

If you have Netflix, start watching it before it goes away. Sixty seven episodes. I’ve watched sixty five. Don’t want to see what they do to him at the end. Because the real ending happened a few episodes before.

The show dates from the era when series TV required 22 or 23 episodes a year. You wonder how any of the actors managed it. And the more I watched, the more I wondered how Simon Baker, so urbane and charming in the Mentalist, always a twinkle in his eye, could play the part of Nick Fallin day in and day out for years.

There’s only one hook for the audience. Everyone detests and despises him, absolutely no one likes him, but it’s clear that he cares, that he feels everyone’s emotions, and he is nevertheless imprisoned inside an icy exterior he cannot break through. Nick Fallin is an undiagnosed borderline autistic. The three Emmies Baker should have received were not forthcoming because he works so hard to do so little. He looks no one in the eye. He does not respond at all to the most obvious of emotional cues. He suffers unutterable torment without a flicker of recognizable emotion. And yet you can still see him hurt. And care. But never a twinkle in his eye.

All this in a show that is stuffed with overacting. The plots frequently careen into soap opera.

Not going to give you spoilers about the long arc of the show. But I will say I have never seen a major network series offer us such a subtly developed and more humanly revealed Christ figure. Nick Fallin? Code name for demon damned. It takes them three years to make their point, a long long arc that does seem prescient about innumerable social and cultural issues, but at the end you find yourself thinking that a guardian angel plumped down on earth might very well find himself conflicted, tempted by vice, and struggling every day to discover what is right in both the highest and lowest realms.

And, oh yeah. Billy Budd. Herman Melville’s Christ figure. Innocence betrayed. A much better read than Moby Dick. And, mercifully, much much shorter.