Basically, Psych is a show about a slacker, Shawn Spencer, whose dad was a great detective. His dad started training him, basically from the cradle, to memorize scenes and pick up on small details and make logical inferences.
Much to his father's chagrin, he ends up using these skills not as a detective but by posing as a psychic. That way, he gets to help fight crime, but also never had to pass a physical or take multiple choice tests.
He's accompanied by his best friend, Burton Guster, who is seriously one of my favorite characters on TV. Well, possibly a combination of Shawn and Gus? Gus is a pharmaceutical salesman. It's the Odd Couple, mixed with a crime procedural (and y'all know how I feel about crime procedurals), mixed with psychics.
WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE? (I don't know. Everything is to like.)
If you're thinking to yourself, "Fake psychic working for the cops? That sounds an awful lot like The Mentalist," then I refer you to episode "Extradition: British Columbia."
Shawn: You've seen The Mentalist, right?
Cop: Yes.
Shawn: It's like that.
Gus: Except that guy's a fake.
Shawn: Right. If I were a fake psychic, it would be eerily similar.
Gus: Exactly the same.
Shawn: A virtual carbon copy.
[H/T on the quote to TVTropes]
Boom. In your face, The Mentalist.
(To be fair, I've never watched it, and for all I know it could be a perfectly good show.)
Anyway, the thing that I really love Psych is the character development. I know, I know. I should get a new soapbox.
BUT I LOVE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.
And it happens very naturally on Psych! You know why? Because they have endless non-plot-based dialogue. An issue I have with a lot of TV shows is that they focus on the action to the point of making it seem that nothing happens in the lives of the characters that isn't related to the case. (Extreme case: House. Though I do like House, and he and his team will be making a cameo
Shawn and Gus banter. They have inside jokes. They have a legitimate relationship and history, which I like to imagine actually exists between James Roday and Dulé Hill, because that would just make me so happy. One of my favorite episodes employs the classic "serial killer picks one member of the crime-fighting team as their personal foil" trope, with Shawn as the foil to the serial killer. Shawn loses his ability to make jokes when he realizes a life is at stake, and asks Gus to be the comic relief to help him keep sane. That results in Gus picking up a toy plane and saying, "Hey everybody! Look at how big I am in relation to this toy plane!"
I was trying to find a video or even a gif but it's totally not revealing itself to me. Ugh.
Anyway! Moving on.
This show is pure gold. I love it all the time. Even the weaker episodes still have at least a couple moments that make me laugh really loudly, and their best jokes have left me laughing so hard that I'm crying and can't breathe. Guys, this show is so good that it could actually be hazardous to your health.
Still, not everybody likes it. I don't understand those people. I don't know that I like them. I advise my friends to not tell me if they don't like it. I guess if you don't like goofy comedy, with actors of the hot-but-human variety (as opposed to the Olivia Wildes and Javier Bardems of the so-hot-it's-absurd-and-they're-not-really-attractive-because-what? variety), with bizarre plotlines and the most encyclopedic knowledge and use of 1980s references - seriously, this show is great partly because it's two guys who would've grown up in the '80s, and so they make jokes about Judd Nelson and Aha and old breakfast cereals, and the show wonderfully accents that with guest spots by the like of Molly Ringwald and, actually, Judd Nelson, I think, and entire episodes devoted to great deceased shows of the past, like Twin Peaks ("Dual Spires") - then you won't like this show.
AND YOU ALSO PROBABLY WON'T LIKE ME. WHY ARE YOU READING THIS BLOG.
Haha, kidding! (Sort of.)
Anyway, Psych is the best. Watch it. It's on Hulu, Hulu+, the USA Network page. I want you to be happy, blog readers. I'm doing this for you.
