Psych: Shawn Interrupted

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bernie Bethel is arrested for murdering his assistant. Lassiter, who single-handedly cracked the case, throws himself a victory party, complete with a crepe station and festive crime-scene photos hung above the punchbowl. His victory is short-lived, as Bernie is soon found not guilty by reason of insanity and is sent to a posh mental hospital instead of prison. Lassiter offers to go undercover as a mental patient (“I’ll grow a beard and wear nothing but tweed!”) to prove that Bernie is faking his condition. Henry decides to send Shawn in his stead, as Shawn could believably pass as someone in need of institutionalization (Shawn: “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Gus: “I wouldn’t”).

Shawn quickly makes himself at home in the luxurious hospital (“Dude, they have electronic bidets!”). Posing as an orderly, Gus goes undercover as well. He soon strikes up a highly inappropriate relationship with an attractive patient, Vivian (Julianna Guill), who is afflicted with multiple personality disorder. The hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Abel Elliott (Gerard Plunkett), is the only outsider aware of Shawn’s and Gus’s true identities.

Shawn befriends Bernie, who does indeed seem legitimately insane. This is because Bernie is played by Brad Dourif, who always seems insane. This is an overwhelmingly awesome bit of casting. Dourif has been in too many films to list here -- if you don’t know him from the Chucky films, you surely know him from Lord of the Rings -- but for the purposes of this episode, the most relevant gig on his résumé would be his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Fun fact: Brad Dourif also starred in Toto’s “Stranger in Town” video.

Awesome bit of casting #2: The hospital is run by the brusque and no-nonsense Nurse Lavender McElroy, who is played by Molly Ringwald. Molly Ringwald! Molly is squandered a bit in this role, actually, but it’s still awfully good to see her.

Shawn grows to believe Bernie is legitimately insane. More, he realizes Bernie’s degenerative arthritis means he couldn’t have strangled his assistant. He theorizes that Dr. Elliott keeps deliberately mixing up Bernie’s anti-psychotic medications to keep him incoherent, at the behest of an unidentified third party. Shawn’s theory is burst when he finds Elliott dead, hit over the head by an unknown assailant. Gus, meanwhile, has been fired for hanky-panky with Vivian. With Elliott dead, no one at the institution realizes that Shawn is only pretending to be insane…

…Y’all can see where this is going, right? Before you know it, Shawn finds himself strapped down to a gurney, bellowing at the top of his lungs to a couple of bemused psychiatrists about how he’s really a psychic detective working undercover for the Santa Barbara Police Department. Hey, I totally saw this episode of 21 Jump Street! It guest-starred Christina Applegate at the height of her Married: With Children fame. 21 Jump Street is one of those shows that really doesn’t hold up over time, but man, I loved it while I was growing up.

Anyway, with Gus’s help, Shawn manages to break Bernie out of the asylum. They confront the real culprit: Nurse McElroy, who, under the orders of Bernie’s devious younger brother Daniel, has been altering Bernie’s medication to keep him delirious. Daniel had tricked his mentally-ill brother into giving him control of his massive fortune; after Bernie’s assistant found out about this, he murdered her and framed Bernie. When Dr. Elliott uncovered this plot, he murdered him as well.

A gun-toting Daniel arrives at Nurse McElroy’s place and threatens to murder Shawn, Gus and Bernie to cover his tracks. Bernie’s diagnosed phobias include a severe fear of saxophone music, so Shawn slips a Kenny G. album on the CD player and blasts “Songbird.” Bernie freaks out and overpowers his brother.

And all ends well. Not one of the stronger episodes, actually -- is it me, or have we had a disappointingly high ratio of clunkers to good episodes this season? -- but I’ll give it a few brownie points for the casting of Dourif and Ringwald and call it even.
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Psych: Dead Man’s Curveball

When the hitting coach of Santa Barbara’s minor-league baseball team, the Seabirds, drops dead of a heart attack brought on by an amphetamine overdose, Coach Mel Hornsby (Danny Glover) hires Shawn and Gus to investigate. To get close to the team and uncover the source of the drugs that killed the coach, the guys go undercover: Shawn poses as the new hitting coach, and Gus as the mascot. Intermittent hilarity ensues.

While searching through the former coach’s home for evidence, Shawn accidentally drinks amphetamine-laced water (and begins acting only slightly more hyper and spastic than usual) from a water bottle belonging to hitter Izzy Jackson (Ken Luckey). Shawn initially theorizes that Izzy was trying to enhance his athletic performance with amphetamines and swapped water bottles with the hitting coach by mistake. Shawn and Gus hit the Seabirds’ favorite watering hole to find evidence that wild-child Izzy is doping. After hearing that Izzy has a habit of pissing his pants while drunk, Shawn and Gus buy him multiple rounds of drinks, wait until he passes out, and steal his urine-soaked jeans.

Izzy’s pants test negative for amphetamines. Suspicion next falls on genial Cal Eason (Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Trucco, the most ruggedly handsome Cylon of them all), Shawn’s longtime idol, who’s been kicked out of the majors and down to the minors for his bad knee and who openly resents Izzy’s unprofessional behavior. Then, for some reason or another, Shawn stops suspecting Cal and starts sort of randomly hurling accusations around the team, which results in a huge, messy, full-team brawl in the middle of a game, after which Izzy is found dead from a blow to the head with a baseball bat.

(Shawn isn’t really at the top of his game this episode. As near as I can tell, he spends the whole time accusing everyone he meets in rapid succession, until he more or less accidentally finds the right culprit. Not his best work. There is also very little Lassiter in this episode, and only a smidgen of Juliet, which is a crying shame. In spite of all that, it’s a perfectly agreeable little episode. Not the best, not the worst.)

The Santa Barbara Police Department takes kindly old Mel, who was last seen angrily heading after Izzy, into custody. However, Shawn (again) suspects Cal, who uses the same kind of bat as the one that killed Izzy and who has just been transferred back to the major leagues… look, once more, I find myself trying to recap a Psych plot in which I had zero vested interest. Again, this certainly isn’t a bad episode, but really, the plot isn’t worth much scrutiny. The culprit turns out to be the team’s general manager, Neil (Matt Kaminsky), who’d drawn up a short-sighted contract guaranteeing Izzy a transfer to the majors or a huge payout after sixty games. With the payout time rapidly approaching, Neil originally tried to sabotage Izzy with amphetamines in his water bottle; when that misfired, he resorted to murder.

A cornered Neil holds Shawn and Gus at gunpoint and threatens to kill them. He’s stopped by the timely arrivals of: a) a bat-wielding Cal Eason, b) Henry, and c) baseball legend Wade Boggs, who steps in to replace a fired Shawn as the hitting coach. I know zilch about professional baseball, but Boggs once did a funny turn on a long-ago Simpsons episode, so he’s okay in my book.

Awesome Eighties references:
Shawn does a long riff on Kevin Costner’s famous “I believe in…” speech from Bull Durnham., which manages to incorporate a Silk Stalkings reference. Oh, sure, Silk Stalkings aired in the Nineties, but didn’t it seem like an Eighties show?

In response to his rioting team, Mel mutters, “I’m getting too old for this crap,” a sanitized version of Danny Glover’s Lethal Weapon catchphrase.
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Duranalysis: Girl Panic!

Duran Duran just released their dazzling, gorgeous, nine-and-a-half-minute Jonas Akerlund-directed video extravaganza for “Girl Panic!”, in which a flock of big-name supermodels of days past -- Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova, Helena Christensen, and Yasmin Le Bon -- play John, Simon, Nick, Roger, and, uh, someone else. Meanwhile, the boys themselves portray an assortment of peripheral characters -- bellhops and drivers and journalists, etcetera. It’s cheerful, decadent, sleazy good fun.

Oh, sure, I originally intended to limit this Duranalysis series to the videos made between 1981 and 1985, but “Girl Panic!” is certainly worthy of an in-depth examination. Here we go:

Naomi Campbell, decked out in a leather corset and teetering stiletto booties and looking like a gajillion bucks, wakes up in a four-poster bed in an luxurious suite in London’s Savoy Hotel.


There’s an empty champagne bottle on a nearby dresser and a couple of scantily-clad women slumbering beside her. She slides out of bed and slinks her way through the suite, navigating around empty champagne bottles and several more passed-out scantily-clad women, most of whom are dressed in some combination of high heels and couture bondage gear. Somebody had herself a fun evening.


Meanwhile, Eva Herzigova glides her way around London, her glittery stiletto sandals dangling from one hand. This is intercut with a bit where she introduces herself as Nick Rhodes to an interviewer, who is played by the real Nick Rhodes. I was going to describe him as “the inimitable Nick Rhodes,” but Eva actually does a damn good job of capturing Nick’s odd mixture of wit and genial snobbery. Nick is still my dream dinner-party guest (just imagine the wine he’d bring!), but in a pinch, Eva could fill in for him nicely.


(While I’m willing to believe this video depicts Duran Duran’s day-to-day lifestyle with staggering verisimilitude, one detail rings false: Can anyone picture Our Nick padding barefoot along the banks of the Thames, the way Eva does here? Even if his feet really, really hurt, he’d keep his shoes firmly on. Suffering for fashion and whatnot.)

We’re introduced to the rest of the band: Helena Christensen, no stranger to starring in iconic music videos, plays Roger, while Naomi is Simon. Of course.

The real John Taylor interviews Cindy-Crawford-as-John-Taylor, who explains that, as Duran Duran has switched guitarists from time to time (Andy to Warren to Andy again to Dom), the band members never know who’s going to show up to play…


…Which segues into the introduction of Yasmin Le Bon. Yasmin informs viewers that she’s not a member of Duran Duran. She’s credited as simply “The Guitarist,” which is as graceful a way as any of getting around the whole Andy problem.


Eva-as-Nick tells Interviewer Nick, “I wrote the last song. I take full credit for it.” According to interviews on the nifty making-of DVD that came enclosed with the All You Need Is Now CD, the lyrics for “Girl Panic!” did indeed spring from Nick’s boundlessly entertaining brain. Nick, by the way, also came up for the idea for this video, which: no kidding. I mean, of course he did. The gorgeous extravagance, the hilariously louche behavior, the gender-bending, the mild kink, the vast amounts of champagne, the pretty sparkly things… this video has Nick’s impeccably-manicured fingers all over it. If you cracked open Nick’s head*, I’m pretty sure this video would spring out, fully formed.

*Please don’t crack open Nick’s head.

When informed by Interviewer Nick that there have been some “truly shocking reviews” of the band in the past, Eva-as-Nick replies, “Damn! I’d love to read all of those.” Oh, me too, Eva. Me too.

John Taylor chauffeurs Cindy-as-John around London in a Rolls. In the backseat, Cindy swills champagne straight from the bottle, sticks her head outside the window to let her glorious mane of hair billow in the breeze, and shows more vibrant personality in these few seconds than she did in all ninety-one exceedingly tedious minutes of Fair Game.


Interviewer Roger asks Helena-as-Roger, “Any addictions?” Helena blithely replies, “There were some episodes, but I’d rather not talk about them.” Cut to Helena-as-Roger passed out atop of stack of Louis Vuitton trunks on a luggage trolley, being wheeled up to her suite by Nick, who is kitted out in the fanciest goddamned bellhop uniform on the planet.


This could be a quick callback to the sexy bellhop in the “Union of the Snake” video, I suppose, though it seems far more reasonable to assume Nick was just looking for an excuse to wear a spiffy uniform and an adorable little cap.


Abandoned by Bellhop Nick, Helena-as-Roger tumbles off her stack of luggage. Finally awake, she looks around in confusion, then staggers to the phone and dials up room service for more champagne. She teeters drunkenly around the suite, taking Polaroid snapshots of the various passed-out girls. Oh, Helena. I think I love you. Or maybe I love Roger? It gets difficult to sort out after a while.


A room service waiter -- that’d be our man Simon Le Bon -- arrives. He’s bearing a champagne bottle and a tray of glasses. When Helena grabs for the bottle, the glasses topple.


The various passed-out scantily-clad girls in the suite begin to wake up. They stumble around with champagne bottles and trip over their high heels and grope each other. I can’t even imagine the champagne budget on this video, but it must have been staggering.

Cindy and Yasmin slink into an elevator with Roger, who’s clad in the livery of a hotel employee, and proceed to paw at him.

When the elevator reaches the appropriate floor, the doors slide open, revealing a stunned and disheveled Roger. You know, this video gets impressively weird when you start thinking about all the gender-reversal and role-switching. So, ah, John just got frisky with Roger in an elevator, right?


Nick -- the real Nick -- continues his interview with Eva-as-Nick: “Now, you have been described as the world's first metrosexual--” Eva cuts him off with a dismissive reply: “I don’t read that stuff, I don’t see that.” A pause, then: “I love my shoes.” Eva Herzigova, you just won the video.


Interviewer John proffers a few genial compliments about Duran Duran to Cindy-as-John; Cindy waxes nostalgic for the days of shoulder pads and big hair. Look, you two, you’re both gorgeous, you both have hair that could incite riots, and I love you both to bits, but compared with the drunken debauchery of Helena’s Roger and the smartest-airhead-in-the-room zingers of Eva’s Nick, you need to raise your game.


Helena-as-Roger: “I don’t really hang out with the rest of the guys all that often. They're a bad influence.”

The band -- the sexy supermodel version of the band, at least -- assembles for a photoshoot for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK, under the direction of fashion powerhouses Dolce & Gabbana.


In lightning-fast flashes, we can see that it’s actually Roger, John, Simon and Nick being photographed.


Post-shoot cocktail party: Roger fixes drinks behind the bar while John, Nick and Simon mill about. The party guests consist of their supermodel alter egos and, yes, scantily-clad women in lingerie. More champagne is consumed -- much more -- and the crowd becomes orgiastic. Of this video, a friend tweeted at me that he felt “kinda drunk after watching it.” To which I will now reply: Yes, exactly, but it’s a good kind of drunk.

The band -- the supermodel version -- perform on a Swarovski crystal-bedazzled set in front of television cameras, which are operated by sexy pantsless women in stilettos. No working model in London went unemployed on the day this video was shot.


As at the Harper’s shoot, we see a few ephemeral shots of the real band mixed in with all the footage of the supermodels. Check out the image in the monitor in this shot:


The snazzy and elegant end credits include this very important disclaimer: "NO SUPERMODELS WERE HARMED DURING THIS PRODUCTION."

And it all ends with Bellhop Nick wheeling a passed-out Helena-as-Roger through the Savoy’s opulent lobby on a luggage trolley.


Whew! Giddy stuff. After that super-saturation of glamour, I’m exhausted, a bone-deep fatigue that can only be driven away with vast quantities of champagne and a ride in the back of a chauffeured Rolls. Outstanding job, boys.
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Psych: The Amazing Psych Man and Tap-Man, Issue #2

Hey, I really, really liked last week’s awesome Halloween-themed Psych. I thought it was an instant classic, with one of the tightest, zippiest scripts we’ve had in a long time.

I mention this mostly because I was a little sour on this week’s episode, and I just wanted to remind myself that I really do love this show.

A masked vigilante known as the Mantis is in Santa Barbara, where he’s been befuddling the Santa Barbara Police Department by repeatedly beating them to crime scenes and apprehending members of the Camino drug syndicate. I don’t want to be too harsh on this episode, because it’s got some shining moments. Case in point: the snazzy revised opening credits, which are illustrated comic book-style.

Full stop, though: How is it possible this episode doesn’t contain a single overt reference to M.A.N.T.I.S., the mid-nineties Sam Raimi-produced FOX series, which starred Carl Lumbly as a vigilante superhero named, yep, Mantis? Under usual circumstances, M.A.N.T.I.S. is exactly the sort of odd pop-culture artifact that would be right up Psych’s alley.

Anyway, Shawn quickly becomes jealous of the attention the SBPD -- and Juliet in particular -- pays to the Mantis. (Naturally, he scoffs at this notion: “How insecure do you think I am? Seriously, how insecure do you think I am? I need you to tell me.”) Determined to uncover the true identity of the Mantis, Shawn initially suspects a new transfer to the SBPD, Officer Scott Reynolds. Hey there, Joey McIntyre! I’ve never had anything for or against New Kids on the Block (nice boys, I’m sure, but they’re no Duran Duran), but Joey, I have to say, looks pretty darn good these days. He’s sort of squandered in this episode, relegated to a not-terribly-uproarious recurring gag where he thinks Shawn is hitting on him (really, Psych, if you’re going to use “It Gets Better” as a punchline, make absolutely sure the joke is worth it) , but I’d be happy to see him stick around the SBPD for subsequent episodes.

There are some Psych plots I will lovingly recap in excessive detail, and then there are some to which I’ll just give a lick and a promise. This falls into the latter category. In brief: In retaliation, the Camino drug syndicate frames the Mantis for murder. In his quest to prove the Mantis is innocent, Shawn uncovers his identity -- the Mantis is Reginald (Miles Fisher), a handsome and distinctly Clark Kentish young reporter. With the help of Shawn and Gus, the Mantis takes down the Camino syndicate… but then absconds with ten million dollars of drug money. Gus and Shawn, disguised as their superhero alter egos Tap-Man (tap dances and throws sand in the faces of miscreants) and The Catch (wears a catcher’s protective gear), manage to bring the Mantis to justice.

There’s a whole lot of funny stuff in there -- for instance, there’s an adorably clever fight scene which takes place in front of conveniently-placed signs reading “POW” and “ZAP” and “BIFF” -- but too many jokes fall flat or, worse, grate on the nerves. You know how ninety percent of the time Shawn’s whole irresponsible man-child routine makes him seem endearingly flawed, but then there’s that other ten percent where he just seems like sort of a douche? Yeah. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Everyone’s allowed the occasional misfire. Next week, Psych. Next week. Bring your A-game.

Awesome Eighties reference:
Distracted by thoughts of the Mantis, Shawn fails to pay attention to Juliet. Juliet: “I just gave you a setup containing Mr. T, Crockett, and a word that rhymes with ‘Mork,’ and I got nothing. Not even a Battle of the Network Stars joke.”

Lassiter-based awesomeness:
Lassiter, expressing his reluctance to give Shawn credit for solving the case: “I would rather spend the rest of my life in Lilith Fair.”

Gus’s fake name:
Watson Williams.
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