You don't need to be psychic to know that refrigerators are bad news in most modern crime procedurals. See a fridge in a CSI episode, and you can bet there's a blood-soaked head hidden in the vegetable crisper. But when Psych (which airs on the cable channel USA) pulls the "dead body in the fridge" bit, it's without the blood, gore and gratuitous decapitations.
Psych is a descendent of the Victorian-era murder mystery, a lineage that includes Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. It's Murder She Wrote for Gen-Xers, a mystery sendup loaded with screwball comedy, deadpan delivery and obscure '80s references by "psychic" crime-fighter Shawn Spencer (James Roday) and his long-suffering best friend, Gus (Dulé Hill).
Shawn, by the way, is not psychic. He just pretends to be. His "visions" are cover for a photographic memory used to solve quirky mysteries. Shawn has had to perpetuate this gimmicky ruse since the pilot episode when his detailed knowledge of a crime scene made him a suspect. Oops. So this clown with a flair for the dramatic came up with the whole psychic explanation and, well, now he's stuck with it. Gus, the more grounded of the two, provides a helping hand, comical sideways glances and a blue subcompact that Shawn dubs The Psychmobile.
Though gore doesn't even get a cameo on Psych, sexual innuendo is a series regular. Cleavage-revealing outfits. Loads of double entendres. One episode revolves around a popular telenovela, and audiences hear references to that show's complicated plotline involving infidelities, vasectomies and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. We've also learned that Gus was married—briefly—as part of a drunken indiscretion.
Language gets a little salty ("b--ch," "a--," "d--n," misuses of God's name), and it's fair to ask whether it's socially responsible to extract humor from characters' callous attitudes toward homicide. Shawn and Gus also bend rules, abuse authority and occasionally break into people's houses.
Meanwhile Shawn's relationship with his cranky father (a strict, gruff ex-cop) ranges from strained to mutually disrespectful. At one point, Dad's desire to chat is met with, "What we have is simple and shallow and unobtrusive. Let's have this conversation when you're 90 and maybe on an oxygen tank."
Psych has problems, but compared to gritty police dramas that splash blood across the small screen, this series—more Monk than Criminal Minds—earns points for its restraint. If nothing else, it's a great reminder that the brain records and files away all sorts of minutia for future access ... including what we see on television.
