Why ‘Psych: The Musical’ was great, and the scheduling was not
We may be a little late in our discussion of “Psych: The Musical,” and for that we blame the crazy folks who decided that it would be a great idea to schedule this event on a Sunday that also included the season finales of “Homeland” and “Masters of Sex,” the fall finales of “Once Upon a Time” and “Revenge,” and also the three-hour spectacular to close off “Survivor: Blood vs. Water.”
And to think, this wasn’t even the biggest problem that we had with the way that this show was marked down in the schedule. “Psych” has been a show at times that has been forced to deal with some changes and tweaks behind the scenes, even going all the way to the Juliet character being born after the pilot. But having this musical air out of order to the entire second half of season 7? That was something that we don’t quite understand fully.
From the standpoint of trying to build up as much hype as possible, we totally understand the decision by USA to turn this into a two-hour December movie. They did something similar for “Royal Pains” last year, and that worked out pretty well for them. But if you are going to do that, why not let everyone writing the scripts know that this is your intention? It was obviously never the original plan for this to air after all of season 7, and it was a distraction for us to have to make sense of the fact that in this world, Juliet didn’t know about Shawn’s secret just yet. It was thanks to that we ran into the biggest problem of all with the musical: The entire time that we watched it, we knew that there was nothing significant that happened. It was hard to really form much in the way of tension for something when you knew that nothing so substantial was going to happen that took away or changed anything that happened in the future.
Now that we’ve gotten all of this off of our chest … this was a fun two hours. Most of the musical numbers were a little cheesy, but this is “Psych”. We like that everything from the pineapples to various nicknames of Gus were included here, as was the appearance of Yang in what happened to be her swan song. The only disappointment to us? That Corbin Bernsen didn’t decide to bust out a few notes; somehow, either he or the writers decided not to make this happen, and let’s just hope that the guy who said yes to “Celebrity Mole” on two separate seasons did not say no to this. Grade: A-.