NBC’s new drama The Irrational is only two episodes into Season 1, and it’s already developing an important mystery from Alec Mercer’s past while also digging into cases each week that nobody else could crack. Law & Order and The Flash alum Jesse L. Martin stars as Alec in his return to the network. Ahead of the third episode, which will deliver what is surely the biggest disaster of the series so far, I spoke with director John Terlesky about the high stakes and what sets Martin apart as lead of a TV show in the 2023 TV schedule.
Episode 3 of The Irrational is called “The Barnum Effect,” and Alec and his team will be brought in after a passenger plane crashes. While the stakes were high in the pilot with Alec trying to exonerate a man convinced of his own guilt and the second episode that involved a life-or-death sequence, the sheer scale of a plane crash should make this the very biggest disaster to deal with. How Alec responds to whatever pressure he faces remains to be seen, but director John Terlesky only had good things to say about working with Jesse L. Martin.
Jesse L. Martin was already a huge TV veteran before The Irrational, with nearly 400 episodes of primetime between Law & Order and The Flash alone. John Terlesky explained to CinemaBlend what it was like to work with Martin on “The Barnum Effect” with all of the star’s experience in TV:
He’s one of those guys that you’ve seen on various different shows, and the Law and Orders. I was always a big fan of his. He’s just such a relaxed presence on screen, and he exudes such intelligence and with a character like Alec, it was really important that you got a lead with that just effortless sense of intelligence and curiosity. He’s been doing it for so long that he makes this stuff that is in some cases a lot of extra exposition and a lot of scientific jargon. He just makes it look so easy. It’s just a pleasure to watch him and it’s really a pleasure to work with him.
Martin was in fact in so much of Law & Order that he ranks on the list of franchise actors who appeared in the most episodes, but Professor Alec Mercer is definitely not Detective Ed Green 2.0. As John Terlesky pointed out, the star has a lot of scientific jargon to rattle off in each episode, and he really manages to sell that Alec has been teaching behavoral science for decades. After I mentioned that Martin’s Alec seems like a professor whose class I’d want to take, the director explained one way that Martin is unlike other TV leads:
Yeah! I would want to take his class. [laughs] He’s just so relaxed. There’s some things that you go on and the lead comes on set and all the sudden, everybody’s kind of on eggshells. But there’s nothing even remotely like that. He’s just super friendly, and there’s no drama. It was great.
While not every lead on every show is going to have the kind of presence that people on set start walking on eggshells, John Terlesky confirmed that there’s “nothing” like that with the “super friendly” Jesse L. Martin. The main character of The Irrational can’t claim that there’s no drama in his work, however!
After the series started with an innocent young man being framed and continuing with a woman reporting her own death after being poisoned, “The Barnum Effect” is moving on to a plane crash. When asked about how high the stakes are for Alec and Co. in the episode, the director explained:
It feels like the stakes for Alec are more alive. At least in the limited amount of exposure that I’ve had with the show, it’s almost like his personal stakes are more evident in the B plot with the church. I get a definite sense there are definitely demons and things to be discovered there. I think part of the charm of the character is that, like in the pilot, there’s almost a detachment that he has, as a scientist and an outside observer. He has this sort of bemused distance sometimes. He’s very committed to whoever the – I think they were calling it ‘the puppy of the week.’ Who’s the puppy they have to save?
Personally, I hope that “puppy of the week” catches on among The Irrational fans, but only time will tell on that front! There are still far more questions than answers in mystery of the church fire that left Alec scarred, and it’s already clear that this case will continue throughout the season. Terlesky continued:
There’s a very palpable sense of commitment to him trying to solve the case and trying to exonerate whoever’s being wrongly blamed for whatever the crime is. I’m very curious because I don’t have any idea. I’m very curious to see what happens with this secondary thing from his past. That’s, I think, something that will keep viewers hooked from week to week as opposed to just minute to minute inside the actual episode. I think it’s great that they have this sort of long game that they’re looking at, and that he’s trying to piece together, sort of in parallel with all these other case of the week kinds of thing that we have.
Fans will have to tune in to see if and how The Irrational continues to handle Alec’s mystery, but the promo for Episode 3 drops some clues about what to expect in the aftermath of the plane cash for Alec, his team, and his ex-wife/FBI agent ally. Take a look:
Tune in to NBC on Monday, October 9 at 10 p.m. ET for “The Barnum Effect” as the latest episode of The Irrational, following The Voice. If you missed the first two episodes or just want to revisit them ahead of the third, you can find the full first season so far streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription.