Psyched

I will not deny that I am a TV junkie.  I have more television guilty pleasures than most people have favorite shows.  One of these is a show on USA called Psych (on Friday’s at 10:00 PM ET – the latest season premiered last week).  In a television landscapes littered with dramas too serious and comedies a bit formulaic, this show manages to be both a suspenseful drama and a surprising comedy without ever taking itself too seriously.

The premise is simple:  slacker son of a cop (Shawn Spencer) who coasts through life manages to get out of trouble with the law by pretending to be psychic (in reality, he is just incredibly perceptive) which leads to a regular work for the police.  The show incorporates some fairly classic elements – a best friend/sidekick which is often is the brunt of Shawn’s jokes; an overly serious father who tries to keep Shawn on the straight and narrow (a reluctant mentor); and a pair of cops, one hard and skeptical, one the object of Shawn’s unrequited affections.  What I love about this show is that it seems to have an undertones of both Don Quixote and Sherlock Holmes with Shawn’s friend Gus paralleling bits of both Sancho Panza and Dr. Watson.  Shawn has an unbridled wit that is refreshing and sophomorically amusing.

The thing about this show is that it doesn’t get stale – they continue to manage to grow the characters and their inter-relationships throughout the series.  While initially the tense relationship between Shawn and his father might have seemed very cut and dry, as the series progresses, more underlying sources for their coarse bond (or lack thereof) become apparent while their current relationship actually grows into something closer to healthy and normal.  I guess it isn’t really so much a guilty pleasure as a solitary one as very few people seem to know about or appreciate this series.  Hopefully I can gather more of a following to it.  We’ll see.