|NEWS| 'The Mentalist' Co-Stars Get Salary Bumps

After renegotiating Simon Baker's deal late last year to give the Mentalist star a major salary bump, series producer Warner Bros. TV has now done the same for the rest of the cast of the CBS crime procedural, which returns for a fourth season this fall.

Like Baker, co-stars Robin Tunney, Amanda Righetti, Tim Kang and Owain Yeoman have all added an extra year to their existing six-year contracts. In exchange, I hear Tunney, who was most recently at about $75,000 an episode, will now go up to over $100,000 an episode next season with built-in yearly salary increases that will bring her up to almost $200,000 per episode at the end of her contract. Word is that Righetti, Kang and Yeoman, who were in the $40,000-$50,000 per episode range, are going up to $70,000-$80,000 an episode with escalators that will take them to over $100,000 in Season 6 and all the way to $150,000 per episode in Season 7.

Under Baker's renegotiated deal, valued at more than $30 million, he is now making $350,000 an episode, a fee that is slated to go up every season, in addition to a significant piece of the series' back end. The Mentalist was sold in off-network syndication in November 2009 in a rich deal with TNT that is fetching Warner Bros. $2.2 million-$2.3 million an episode.

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Source: Deadline.