what a show… nobody is doing it like them anymore truly. psych is a two-thousand-six detective dramedy that follows shawn spencer, psychic consultant for the santa barbara police department. he flirts with the detectives he works with, drags his best friend along to crime scenes, and solves cases that no one else can, with help from the spirits. the department’s solve rate is way up, shawn’s agency gets paid, and it’s basically great for everyone. the only issue? shawn’s not actually psychic. he’s a good detective, maybe even better than anyone on the force, but the second the lie is out of his mouth, he’s already in too deep to backtrack. it’s completely ridiculous but it’s also so so much fun.
i’m kind of obsessed with this show at the moment and a lot of that has to do with just how good all the characters are, especially near the beginning of the series, which is where i am in my current rewatch. nobody is exactly what you’d expect them to be, they’re so much more and so much better.
hit the twisty menus to read me being obsessive and insane!
like that, yeah!
shawn spencer, played by james roday rodriguez, is currently the absolute love of my life. he’s so absurd. on paper, he is the world’s best police detective. he has an eidetic memory, insane observational skills, and brilliant deductive reasoning, thanks to his parents. his mother has the same memory he does, and his father trained him to be a detective from a young age. he can read guilt off of tv interviews, solve cases by skimming a file, and accurately reconstruct crime scenes hours after looking at them for just two minutes. he canonically passed the detective’s exam with a perfect score at fifteen years old.
but he’s also the poster child for adhd and a major commitment-phobe, he’s got a bad habit of abandoning things that fail to keep his interest, and he’s a liar at heart. he’s immature, constantly joking around, and most of what he does could be described as “antics.” the later seasons start to lose the balance that the earlier seasons had between his serious and silly natures, letting his genuine high intelligence fall to the wayside in favor of him being childish, but when he’s allowed to do both, he really shines.
shawn and the truth
so much of shawn’s character is based on him lying to other people. he makes his livelihood lying to the cops! his business is named “psych,” as in “gotcha!” the man’s relationship with the truth is tenuous at best. but what, specifically, he chooses to lie about is so interesting to me. the psychic lie is all theatrics and smoke and mirrors, but the implicit lie behind it, the thing that it’s covering up, is a lie of omission. he doesn’t let people see his highly competent or serious sides, instead letting them think that he’s an idiot and a harmless fool. he lives to make people underestimate him. i think that’s part of the reason why i love episodes where he’s under intense pressure or in immediate danger— he lets that veneer fall away.
to be clear, i don’t think that he’s lying about being a generally carefree, lighthearted guy. the man has a heart full of whimsy, it is undeniable. but i do think that he plays it up, acts it out in stressful situations. i used the word veneer like, two sentences ago, and maybe it’s that, a shiny exterior used to distract, or maybe it’s more like armor, to cover and protect, but either way, it’s definitely a way for shawn to get other people, maybe even himself, to stop examining his deeper, perhaps less pleasant emotions.
the really fun thing is that some of the shit that happens to him in this show would leave any normal person incredibly traumatized, let alone a person who can remember every moment of their life perfectly. combine that with the fact that he doesn’t let himself unpack the reality of his negative feelings? well that, my friend, is a perfect recipe for imagining him completely breaking down in my free time. as you can tell i am perfectly normal about him.
now, i truly love shawn, but without burton “gus” guster, played by dulé hill, next to him, he would probably be unbearable. gus is shawn’s childhood best friend, and at first glance, he’s the straight man to shawn’s everything. he has a stable job as a pharmaceutical salesman, always protests shawn’s unsanctioned investigations, and bickers with shawn enough to keep him in check. upon any closer inspection, though, he’s just as ridiculous, only in a completely different direction.
he always plays along with whatever insane pseudonym shawn gives him, he always somehow has a bit of niche trivia or a hyper-specific skill that helps the current investigation, and despite his protests, he’s almost always invested in the cases. he and shawn are ride-or-die, and that relationship between the two of them is the life of the show. like shawn, his character suffers a little near the end of the series, his sharp intellect filed down significantly, but the dynamic between the two never fails.
once i make it past the polarizing express and cog blocked i will have something on gus.
pinky promise!!
carlton lassiter, played by timothy omundson, is the kind of character where, if he was a real person, i would hate his ass so bad. fortunately he is not real, because i am so obsessed with him. he’s just such a weird guy. he’s a fucking weirdo! at the surface level, yes, he’s… a cop. kind of the platonic ideal of a cop, too. he’s got an itchy trigger finger, an idealized sense of justice, and a tough-on-crime attitude that would make him a real-life danger to society, but again, fiction. he’s abrasive and socially graceless, and he’s perpetually annoyed by shawn. he doesn’t believe the psychic lie for a second. despite all of this, i love lassie.
beyond his unpleasant exterior is a man who genuinely cares about the people around him and refuses to admit it. he acts like he doesn't give a crap what people think of him, but when he learns how others really see him, he's distraught. he has, like, three hobbies and it's so fun to watch him enjoy them. i dunno, maybe it's just tim omundson's fantastic acting, but whenever lassie is happy about something, it feels like seeing a kid on christmas.
as the series goes on, he mellows out a lot, definitely due to the influence of all the people around him— shawn, gus, his partner jules, even the chief of police, vick. i wish the show had ended with him keeping those people close, but his character develops significantly regardless.
shawn, lassie, and the truth
i’m gonna go crazy joker insane. i’m not even kidding. i’m off the fucking deep end about these two.
lassiter starts the series off not believing in shawn. seriously. he starts the series off *by* not believing in shawn. that’s the inciting incident, and that’s the crux of what i find so fascinating about their relationship. in the pilot, shawn tells him the truth about how he solves cases, and lassie doesn’t want to hear it. he doesn’t want to believe that a civilian could be better than him at police work, and so he doesn’t. it’s only when it seems like shawn really is going to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit that he comes up with the psychic act. and lassiter doesn’t believe that, either.
he spends the entire show declaring shawn a fraud, and claiming that as soon as he has the evidence, he’s going to expose psych. he is not quiet about the fact that he does not respect shawn or what he does at all. but, ironically enough, there’s a good argument to be made for him lying about that. as early as the first season, in a scene that makes me spiral every time i think about it, he confesses that while he doesn’t know how exactly shawn solves cases, he finds it “astounding."
by the third season, lassie likely has enough evidence to actually prove shawn is lying. seriously!! he spends enough time with shawn’s father, hearing anecdotes about his childhood, that he could very easily have picked up on the detective training henry put him through. in the season three opener, he meets shawn’s mother and learns about her eidetic memory. if he really wanted to expose shawn, he could. and yet, he doesn’t.
i have mixed feelings on the ending of season eight, but one thing i will never get over is the message that shawn records before leaving, and how lassiter responds to it. lassiter, the loudest in the series about proving shawn to be a fake, is presented with a videotaped confession. and what does he do? he stops the dvd and breaks it before he has a chance to hear. he really doesn’t want to know the truth, and whatever the reason, whether it’s for plausible deniability, or respect for shawn as a detective, or just liking him as a person after all those years, i don’t think it really matters. he lets shawn keep lying to him. i’m normal. i’m normal. i am normal.
i don't think we deserved marlowe
this is going to sound like a shitty take, and my own mother disagrees with me here, but i do not think lassiter’s relationship with marlowe was earned. from a metatextual standpoint, of course.
i think marlowe is a great character, and honestly a very good examination of the fucked-up medical system the united states has, criminal activity spurred on by it, and the moral grey area that that falls into. i also think that lassiter was not equipped to grapple with any of that at all.
throughout the entire show, lassie has a very black-and-white idea of morality, and his sense of right and wrong is almost entirely constructed based on what is legal versus illegal. there really wasn’t enough buildup, in my opinion, to justify the turnaround that he has on marlowe. i can say she did nothing wrong, free my girl, as much as i want, but the fact of the matter is she was a willing participant in a plot to drug people and steal their blood. i really don’t think the lassiter we’d gotten to know for five seasons and change would immediately forgive that.
i think it could have been a turning point for his character, certainly, his genuine feelings for her despite her criminal activity prompting an examination of his own moral code and how he wants to conduct himself as an upholder of the law, but i guess that’s too much to ask of a two-thousands cop show.
jules text
my feelings on shules— spoiler! they’re mixed
i’ve already ranted about this ad nauseum on discord, but this is *my* psych shrine and i’ll make you read whatever unhinged ramblings i want, goddammit. the relationship between shawn and jules could have been so good, and the show dropped the fucking ball. i’ve spent time debating whether they were actually written poorly or if i am just prejudiced against straight ships, and i have come to the conclusion that both can be true!
in my head, their story is so much better than it actually is. imagine: charming but flaky guy is immediately infatuated with professional and practical girl, maybe she feels the same way, but she rebuffs him because he’s not relationship material. as the series progresses, the guy matures— somewhat, it’s still shawn spencer we’re talking about— maybe he has flings with other girls, but realizes he’s serious about the main love interest, for the first time in his life. eventually they both reach a point where a relationship between them would work. this would be a perfectly fine narrative, and it is probably what the show was aiming for.
it is not what happens.
instead, we see shawn sabotaging every relationship juliet has, acting as though he has some sort of claim over her. we see him get into a relationship with a *different* girl in season three. and i like abigail! i think she was a fun, well-written character who worked well with shawn. but the show acts as though juliet is the first time shawn is serious about a relationship, when that just provably isn’t true.
i even think the abigail-versus-juliet plotline could have been saved if it was shawn who broke up with abigail. if the writers had him realize he was too hung up on juliet, and not want to string abigail along. instead, she breaks up with him because his job is too dangerous. come on.
not to mention how obnoxious the show got with teasing the will-they-won’t-they. a shot of shawn kissing abigail? jules is in the background, wearing a startlingly similar dress. shawn and abigail have their first date? juliet doesn’t realize and asks shawn out, forcing him to either decline or stand abigail up again. shawn is in mortal danger? he calls juliet to give her information about his kidnappers but pretends he’s calling abigail to tell her he loves her.
side note, i do not think juliet would have asked shawn out at the end of an evening with mr. yang. i really don’t. it was just the beginning of a really annoying storyline and i did not like it. whatever.
the show also handles the big psychic lie poorly in regards to shules. juliet finds evidence that he’s lying, breaks up with him, and it gets resolved, like, three episodes later. she forgives him. they get back together, and even though jules says that they need to take it slow, the whole thing basically never gets brought up again.
that’s the main problem i have with their relationship, i think. it’s built on a lie from the very beginning. of the entire cast, juliet is among the most trusting of the lie, if not *the* most. every other character is pretty much working with some form of plausible deniability, but jules *believes* him. there’s no way to write a relationship built on that without putting in an absolute fuckton of work to resolve it, and i don’t think psych really does. it’s unfortunate.
