NOW ENTERTAINMENT Oct. 600- 12, 2024 Month - 00, 2023
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“Law & Order” alum Jesse L. Martin returns in Season 2 of the NBC mystery-drama series “The Irrational,” starting Tuesday, Oct. 8.
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Jesse L. Martin stars in “The Irrational”
Cover Story Start making sense: Jesse L. Martin delves back into ‘The Irrational’ By Jay Bobbin It isn’t irrational for Jesse L. Martin (“Law & Order”) to be pleased about getting a second season for his latest series. However, he continues to deal with cases that defy conventional logic as an internationally prominent behavioral psychology authority who assists law officers as “The Irrational” begins its sophomore round Tuesday, Oct. 8, on NBC. Each new episode will also stream on Peacock, starting the day after its NBC debut. Washington, D.C.,-based Prof. Alec Mercer (Martin) knows criminal behavior from a close proximity, having suffered injuries in a church bombing many years ago. Martin says he relates very personally to his “Irrational” alter ego, reasoning that as an actor, “If you’re worth your salt in any way, shape or form, your whole job is to look at human behavior and reflect it, whether it be
on stage or on film or small screen. On television, I’ve been doing that all my life. Kids do it with their imaginations every single day; they figure out how to behave like a monster or a police officer, and I do that as a career. I just didn’t have scientific terms for it coming up. Now I do. “I can see it sort of from a scientific angle, but growing up as an actor training, it was always from sort of an emotional place: ‘It gets people to feel this way or feel that way, and what does that look like in the body?’ Now it’s sort of like I’ve got terms to describe it, so I feel a little bit smarter.” Mercer’s work with the FBI has another element, since one of the agents is his ex-wife Marisa (played by Maahra Hill, “Delilah”), but his sister Kylie (Travina Springer, “Strange Angel”) and his university research assistants, played by “Partner Track’s” Arash DeMaxi and Molly Kunz (“Widows,” 2018), help to keep him on track.
The show is making room for Mercer to take a somewhat fresh approach in Season 2, since the lingering bombing mystery reached something of a resolution at the end of the first season. “I find that it’s really satisfying for an audience to wonder, but to also get those answers,” maintains “The Irrational” creator and executive producer Arika Lisanne Mittman, who cut her producer’s teeth on the Showtime fan-favorite “Dexter.” “I never wanted that storyline to be something that spanned five years of a series. I wanted it to have a satisfying ending to Season [1], and to open up the second season for new questions, new mysteries and new stories.” However, Martin notes, “What it led to was more questions for my character. Often when people go through a traumatic experience, it — for lack of a better way to put it — becomes part of their identity. If the story is
solved, or the mystery of it is solved, there’s something that happens to their identity in it. That bleeds probably for the eternity of the series, which I think is really fascinating.” Mittman insists that the crime-solving aspect of “The Irrational” isn’t meant to override the psychological one. “We do always look at every episode [in terms of], ‘How is this about psychology? What is the psychology in this episode?’ We don’t ever want to tell just a traditional by-thebook kind of case. Dan Ariely, who wrote the book that this is based on [‘Predictably Irrational’], consults for us. He helps us with some of these psychological terms, and we have to do a lot of reading. “We and the writers have to do a lot of research and a lot of writing for characters who are smarter than me,” Mittman allows. “It’s a challenge. It’s always hard, but I love it, because it helps make me smarter. And makes the audience smarter, I hope.”
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