It’s a pretty sweet fantasy of a professional life: a bunch of shrinks in a beautiful old home in New Haven, sharing breakfast each morning and knowing all about each others’ personal lives. It also sounds a lot like the housing setup on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ except instead of dramatic life-or-death occasions, we have couples’ therapy and sullen child patients.
Lili Taylor is Ann Bellowes, the main character of ‘State of Mind,’ the new comedy-drama premiering on Lifetime at 9 p.m. tomorrow. In the first episode, available online now Ann discovers that her husband has been sleeping with their couples’ therapist, and must deal with the collapse of her marriage while also finding a new tenant for her office building-- her husband, a fellow shrink, worked in that idyllic Victorian as well. In the meantime her coworker James (Derek Riddell) is treating a young Russian boy adopted by wealthy American parents, and his genuine affection for the boy is taken by others to be something more sinister. Coming into all of this a stranger is Barry White (Devon Gummersall, a.k.a. Brian Krakow from ‘My So-Called Life’), a lawyer who has been brought in as the new tenant. He volunteers to be James’ lawyer when his young patient goes missing, and also may have eyes for Ann as well.
‘State of Mind’ fits pretty comfortably into Lifetime’s established genre-- as I mentioned when writing about their other new show, ‘Side Order of Life,’ both debuts offer the usual Lifetime cocktail of empowerment, friendship, occasional humor, and occasional true-life horror stories, though here its pedophilia rather than eating disorders. The humor is all pretty gentle, even the fantasy sequences (very much in the tradition of ‘Six Feet Under,’ of which Taylor is an alum) don’t bite too hard, and everyone has the epiphany or moment of clarity they need before the episode is over.
Not that any of this is a bad thing. And ‘State of Mind’ does benefit from its high-quality cast and production values; as a younger, dorkier sibling to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ it stands up pretty well. It’s not something to be embarrassed for enjoying, but it’s definitely not one of those things that the TV snobs who only watch HBO shows will grudgingly admit to liking. It, instead, falls somewhere in the middle, in a land where you will share a bed with your husband the day you find out he’s cheating on you, and where suspicions of being a pedophile don’t result in anyone’s face getting smashed in. In other words, the Lifetime network.
’State of Mind’ debuts on Sunday at 9 p.m. on the Lifetime channel.
