Episode Title: "Psych: The Musical"
Episode Grade: A-
A show has to reach a certain point and achieve a certain position in order to justify a musical episode. It takes a secure position and a heaping helping of confidence to successfully sell your network on such a risky and potentially silly experiment. That or a complete lack of ideas.
Fortunately, it's the former with Psych.
There's something rather extraordinary about the fact that Psych has been on the air for seven years and has reached a point where it can pull off a musical episode. This is a series that, at its most self-important and self-serious, is about as substantial as a bowl of sugary cereal. It's a silly, frankly stupid affair that mines a formula established in its earliest episode and relies on a lead performance that is always just this side of insufferable.
It's also one of the most consistently entertaining shows on television, and it has more than earned the indulgence of a musical episode.
And here's the best part: the musical episode is really good. It's a little bloated, to be sure; Psych rarely has enough material to really justify its one-hour runtime, and two hours is a bit much for a show with so little ambition. The case of the week (kind of a misnomer, as the show hasn't aired an episode since May) is one of the more compelling investigations I can remember, but it's wrapped up in a fairly standard and boring fashion, as the culprits turn out to be a couple dudes we barely spoke to earlier in the episode.
But damn, this was fun. Everyone involved with the production clearly had a blast, and it's also obvious that the show's writers are passionate fans of musicals. The songs are clever, catchy, well-crafted numbers, and, perhaps most impressively, the episode is confident enough to let large stretches of time pass without a forced musical number.
Psych episodes derive a lot of their quality from the strength of their guest stars, and tonight's as a good one in Rent's Anthony Rapp, bringing a little bit of professionalism to the show as "Z," a playwright locked up in a mental institution after he apparently set a fire in his old playhouse upon learning that his beloved Jack the Ripper play would die an early death.
When Z, seven years after his imprisonment, escapes from his institution and the director of a new, purportedly unique Ripper musical ends up dead, the Santa Barbara police department swings into action, aided by our old friends Shawn and Gus.
As I said earlier, this is actually pretty enjoyable stuff. The investigation itself is basically a jumbo-sized version of the usual procedural work we see on Psych; there are a lot of red herrings, Shawn and Lassiter (an always-delightful Timothy Omundson) disagree on most things, Shawn fingers a suspect who ends up dying in the middle of the investigation, etc.
Still, this is a big, sprawling affair, and I found myself enjoying all the little twists more than I usually do. A lot of this can be chalked up to Ally Sheedy, making her fourth (and, sadly, final) appearance as "Yang," the serial killer from an earlier story arc. Sheedy has always brought a really impressive, deranged charisma to her role, and it was clever plotting to tie her into the big event.
Yang even gets a death that is, of all things, heroic and more than a little heartbreaking. There's a surprisingly touching little musical number with Jimmi Simpson's Mary Lightly, who shows up to welcome Yang into the afterlife. She's probably going to Hell, but Mary will ask around, see if he can get Heaven to lighten up and let her in. He's not optimistic.
It would be silly and pointless to run through all the developments in the case, most of which, again, hit the expected Psych beats. Z, it turns out, didn't actually kill anyone, which Shawn figures out relatively early and thus must be true and only proven at the very end of the episode. The producer and director of the original show had accidentally killed the critic who was going to ruin their Ripper musical, then framed Z and, seven years later, found his original, awesome script for the play and revived it under a new title.
The resolution is a little unsatisfying, simply because one of the killers (the producer) is dead, and the other (the director) got about a minute and a half of screentime. The motives ascribed to them make sense, and I certainly buy the overall story, but it would have been nice to see just a little more of these guys; I don't even remember the characters' names, and I'm drawing a blank in trying to remember anything about the producer. It's not like this episode lacked time.
Still, this is nit-picking. "Psych: The Musical" is a big, fury ball of joy, much like the series as a whole. There's precious little to complain about, and so much to enjoy.
Notes
- I'm not sure if any of the cast had their voices dubbed over with professional singers (Jenna Fisher's voice was replaced during the musical numbers in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), but assuming those were the natural voices, that was an impressive display of talent. I particularly enjoyed Maggie Lawson's voice.
- I want to single out Dule Hill for some special praise in this section. He's been wonderful during his entire run on Psych, and I say that as someone who really didn't care for his performance on The West Wing. Here, he shows off his exceptional dancing skills (according to IMDB he got his start as a tap-dancer on Broadway) and generally lights up the screen.
- "I see a light." "Do you see fire and brimstone?"
- The Skype product placement tonight was a little blatant.
- "Z crushed you? With a piano? Like in the Roadrunner?"
- "He was the Phantom." "Billy Zane!" "The other Phantom." "There is no other Phantom."
- "It's set in London in 1888." "So what are you saying? Black people hadn't been invented yet?"
- "Just jam in as many syllables as you can before the break/It's literally impossible to make a mistake."
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