With the proliferation of police procedurals on network TV, something has been lost from the era of classic crime shows: the quirky, individualistic detective. Aside from Vincent D'Onofrio's Detective Robert Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, today's prime time network crime-solvers are pragmatic team players with minimal personal oddities who focus on standard, proven methods of finding out whodunit and why.
Thankfully, cable has stepped in to provide us with modern heirs to Columbo, Kojak and Miss Marple. From deceptively sweet Southern belle Brenda Leigh Johnson on TNT's The Closer to everything-phobic clean freak Adrian Monk on USA's Monk, original cable shows are full of colorful detectives. USA even briefly gave us a new version of Kojak, starring Ving Rhames, and it returns this week with yet another endearingly offbeat detective on Psych (Fridays, 10 p.m.). James Roday plays Shawn Spencer, a congenital loser who, according to the pilot, has held 57 jobs since graduating from high school. Like many lovable slackers in TV history, Shawn seems to have no trouble attracting women and doesn't worry about things like paying for his apartment or planning for his future.
Where Shawn diverges from the average TV layabout is in his uncanny ability to solve crimes, often by seeing only a few seemingly unremarkable details. When he calls in one too many tips to the local police (he discovers culprits simply by watching reports on the local news), they bring him in for questioning under the suspicion that he couldn't know so certainly who committed those crimes unless he was involved. At that point we finally get to the crux of the show, which develops in an effortless way even though it sounds horribly convoluted: To avoid suspicion, Shawn claims that he came by his insights not because he's a freakishly brilliant detective, but because he's a psychic.
He's not, of course, and so Psych turns into something like a parody of NBC's Medium, except it's also a pretty clever crime drama in its own right. Shawn, like any good detective, has a polar-opposite sidekick: Gus (Dulé Hill of The West Wing), Shawn's straitlaced buddy who works as a pharmaceutical salesman and thinks the whole fake-psychic thing is a very bad idea. Naturally, by the end of the first episode, the two have opened their own detective agency.
As a stereotypical sardonic slacker, Shawn might be grating, but his lack of ambition paired with his extraordinary powers of detection gives him an extra dimension, and the show opens up his back story with his gruff cop father (Corbin Bernsen), who forced him to learn detective skills at a young age. It's not hard to believe that Shawn can notice relevant minute details and hit on the sister of a kidnapping victim all at the same time—and end up both solving the case and getting the girl.
At least in the pilot, Psych doesn't have the most innovative mysteries around. But the banter between Shawn and Gus is quick and fun, and Roday does a good job keeping Shawn endearing while not hiding his flaws. It's possible the fake-psychic gimmick could get old after a while, but for now it provides amusing fodder for the rivalry between Shawn and the police detectives who suspect he isn't a real psychic but can't figure out how he's actually solving the cases. It also serves to set Psych apart, which, in a TV landscape cluttered with CSIs and Law & Orders, is far and away its best quality.