I’m not a huge fan of Psych, but I can see why so many people are. Every time I watch the show, it’s like being shaken by a 500-pound man with sugary breath who keeps slapping you about the face and screaming, “DAMMIT, BE ENTERTAINED!” Every aspect of the show is carefully calibrated to be as maximally entertaining as possible, from the writing, which is always goofy and full of banter, to the acting, which is never not quirky, to the technical elements, which are pretty much the definition of procedural lite. Every time I watch the show, which isn’t often, I largely enjoy myself and then promptly forget about it. But I laugh three or four times an episode, and I generally like the cast, and isn’t that all it takes to have fun on a Friday night anyway?
Actually, I think Psych would be one of my favorite shows if it didn’t turn every twist of the screw just a little bit too far. The show is almost too manic, as if the creators watched Moonlighting and Remington Steele and all of the other great goofy detective shows and said, “You know what? It can be done crazier!” and then proceeded to just push everything a few steps farther. James Roday’s performance as main character Shawn Spencer is technically proficient, to be sure, but falls on the wrong side of irritating too often, as though we’re not trusted to get that the people around him find him an irritant. (Worse, I think we, the audience, are supposed to find this kinda charming, which just doesn’t come across.)
Similarly, the joke writing on the show, while often very funny (there’s a lengthy running joke about, again, Remington Steele in the premiere which is actually pretty great), but it just keeps pushing and pushing until you never really think anyone’s in any danger of anything. I don’t think a show like this needs dangerously high stakes to succeed (it is, after all, meant to be a summer treat), but if everything in the show is a sarcastic trifle, then eventually nothing is, and the whole enterprise becomes tiring. Similarly, the character relationships are written fairly well on this show, but they, too, push the limits. Dule Hill’s Gus defines long-suffering when put up in opposition to Shawn, while Shawn has a will-they/won’t-they relationship with Maggie Lawson’s Detective O’Hara simply because the show apparently decided it needed something like that. Everyone in the show, for better or worse, is defined in their relationship to Shawn, and while Roday is up to the challenge, the show too often succumbs to the challenge of making him so irritating that he ceases to just irritate everyone on screen and starts irritating people outside of the show’s world. Namely, us.
Actually, though, I don’t think that any of this would be so irritating as to be off-putting without the show’s frantic production design. The editing of the “hits” Shawn gets when he’s investigating a case (similarly to The Mentalist, something the show points out in another joke tonight about how that show is pretty much ripping this one off, Shawn solves cases by being really observant, though he makes a point of pretending to be a psychic, as opposed to Simon Baker’s joyless automaton on that other show) is often all over the place, as though the show feels like it has to remind us of every little clue dropped throughout its run time. In addition, the score for this show may be the most abrasive on television. ABC’s dramedies run twinkly music designed to remind us not to take anything we’re watching too seriously throughout their runtimes, but it’s hard to say that any of them is as bombastic as the score employed on Psych, which often feels like being trapped inside of a Gravitron with a gypsy orchestra.