Robin Tunney on escaping "Prison Break"

There were many, many things we had to leave out of yesterday's story on "The Mentalist," but few were as entertaining as Robin Tunney's meditations of her days working on "Prison Break."

She started off fairly diplomatically: "On 'Prison Break,' they had me do all this expositional stuff that didn't work for me, it just wasn't who I was." She was semi-diplomatic and semi-brutally honest when she added, "The people were really nice, it was just my role that was dogsh!t."

Tunney discussed the limitations of the genre, at least as far as actors are concerned: "Those shows where everything's urgent because the world's always about to blow up, they're fun to watch, but they're not fun to act in, because you never get three-dimensional characters. They never smile. You never even see them relax. You never see other things going on."

Discussing the terror of plot gymnastics, where showrunners try to cram remarkably stupid behavior down their viewers' throats while hoping that the hyperventilating nature of the show will fake people out into not noticing how dumb the plots are getting, Tunney said, "I don't think the audience realizes that when they think an actor looks ridiculous, the actor feels ridiculous, too. I remember people would take great umbrage at the bad decisions that Veronica had made. They would be angry at me on the street and I'd say, 'Do you really think I write this? That I walk into the writers room and say, "You know what would really be stupid for my character to do?" And that the conversations never went on like, "Well, this is really stupid, but my character's doing it?" And they'd say, "Well, someone's got to do it. How else is the show going to keep going?"'" I think that's hard on an actor." Her character got killed off at the beginning of season two, doing something pretty foolhardy.

(Robin's the one in the foreground.)

Tunney professes to like her current gig on "The Mentalist," because it trucks in some actual character development. "If you're going to be on national television," she says, "you definitely don't want to make an ass of yourself."

- "Prison Break:" 9 tonight, Fox Channel 11.
- "The Mentalist:" 9 p.m. Tuesday, CBS Channel 2.