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.
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 anything that fails 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.
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 nickname 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, but the dynamic between the two never fails.
