An Evening With Mr. AWESOME
HOLY CRAP
THIS IS WHY I WATCH TELEVISION OMG
I just finished watching my Season 3 Psych DVDS -- which means I just finished watching An Evening With Mr. Yang, the season finale. I had been avoiding this ep because I knew vagaries of the plot (Serial Killer comes to Santa Barbara) and there are a billion tags, which is the internatinal fandom signal of awesome, and because I have a mental illness I can't watch eps that I feel will be particularly awesome. But I watched and now I am reduced to an incoherent squeeing mass.
Psych is such a fluffy show -- I compared it to a souffle to Reyka earlier. Light, frothy, sweet-natured with solid foundation of good (if crazy) people doing the right thing. Season 1 is like cupcakes made of television. But the show has always had a core of drama to draw on, little spicings of angst and danger that only occasionally surfaced in earlier seasons. Season 3 takes all those little garnishes and knocks them up a notch, BAM! Subtext turns into text, Shawn grows up quite a bit, the criminals start actually carrying guns, the stakes get higher and then through the roof. The show slides from frothy detective show almost-parody to an almost Whedonesque mix of comedy and action/drama. Shawn matures from an overgrown kid to a (still snarky) real detective and the show grows with him.
I could pimp S3 to Reyka easily -- hell, there's even a Walks Into a Bank episode, my favorite fandom trope ever. But I think you *need* the first two seasons. You need the cupcakes, you need the froth, you need the episodes where Shawn pretends to be a Swedish veterinarian or eats Chinese food at a murder scene. Because that's how you know just what it means when a case brings him almost literally to his knees. The split-seconds of genuine emotion only have meaning because they have been so rare. You have to build up the characters before you can really knock them down.
If I had been writing the show, I would have gone in this direction right off the bat. And it would probably still have been a good show. But I have to respect Steve Franks -- he made us wait and made it worth it. (Us being angst-whore fangirls.) I don't think the dramatic moments would have quite the power they do otherwise...
...though I hope not every episode is like this, if only for my heart. It's not often a tv show gives me a genuine adrenaline rush.
To summarize: HOLY SHIT I LOVE THIS SHOW I CAN HAS SEASON 4 NAO PLZ
THIS IS WHY I WATCH TELEVISION OMG
I just finished watching my Season 3 Psych DVDS -- which means I just finished watching An Evening With Mr. Yang, the season finale. I had been avoiding this ep because I knew vagaries of the plot (Serial Killer comes to Santa Barbara) and there are a billion tags, which is the internatinal fandom signal of awesome, and because I have a mental illness I can't watch eps that I feel will be particularly awesome. But I watched and now I am reduced to an incoherent squeeing mass.
Psych is such a fluffy show -- I compared it to a souffle to Reyka earlier. Light, frothy, sweet-natured with solid foundation of good (if crazy) people doing the right thing. Season 1 is like cupcakes made of television. But the show has always had a core of drama to draw on, little spicings of angst and danger that only occasionally surfaced in earlier seasons. Season 3 takes all those little garnishes and knocks them up a notch, BAM! Subtext turns into text, Shawn grows up quite a bit, the criminals start actually carrying guns, the stakes get higher and then through the roof. The show slides from frothy detective show almost-parody to an almost Whedonesque mix of comedy and action/drama. Shawn matures from an overgrown kid to a (still snarky) real detective and the show grows with him.
I could pimp S3 to Reyka easily -- hell, there's even a Walks Into a Bank episode, my favorite fandom trope ever. But I think you *need* the first two seasons. You need the cupcakes, you need the froth, you need the episodes where Shawn pretends to be a Swedish veterinarian or eats Chinese food at a murder scene. Because that's how you know just what it means when a case brings him almost literally to his knees. The split-seconds of genuine emotion only have meaning because they have been so rare. You have to build up the characters before you can really knock them down.
If I had been writing the show, I would have gone in this direction right off the bat. And it would probably still have been a good show. But I have to respect Steve Franks -- he made us wait and made it worth it. (Us being angst-whore fangirls.) I don't think the dramatic moments would have quite the power they do otherwise...
...though I hope not every episode is like this, if only for my heart. It's not often a tv show gives me a genuine adrenaline rush.
To summarize: HOLY SHIT I LOVE THIS SHOW I CAN HAS SEASON 4 NAO PLZ