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Giorgina Makara
A little over a week ago, I posted some Psych scoop on the heels of speaking with Steve Franks, the show's creator, writer, and executive producer. Well, that interview with Mr. Franks actually lasted nearly 40 minutes (apparently we were both really excited to talk about the show!), and spanned an array of topics including tonight's season finale (which airs on USA at 10/9c), what kind of things to expect next season, the writing process for the show, how the idea for Psych came about in the first place, and even the Olympics.
If you're not familiar with Psych, you better live in Canada (where the show doesn't air), or you don't have any excuse! But just in case you haven't seen it but are still intrigued, the USA Network show stars James Roday as Shawn Spencer, a psychic consultant with the Santa Barbara Police Department. He works alongside his lifelong best friend, Burton Guster (Dule Hill), who is in on the fact that Shawn isn't actually a psychic at all, but rather just has extremely keen observational skills. Together, they assist detectives Carlton Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) and Juliet O'Hara (Maggie Lawson), while getting occasional (if reluctant) help from Shawn's father, Henry (Corbin Bernsen), a former police detective. The show is first and foremost a comedy, especially the silliness between Shawn and Gus, but because of its subject matter, there is also mystery and a bit of drama in the mix.
Anyway, below is the transcript of my lengthy chat with the man behind my personal favourite hour of television. Steve was a delight to speak with, and I thank him for allowing me to have my first real conversation with someone about the show (I'm in Canada, where DVDs are the only way to watch it, and I don't know anybody else who does). If you're a fan of Psych, or even if you're just interested in what goes on to put together a television show, I hope you enjoy the interview. Also, thanks to Diana Kim for transcribing it!
SF: Usually a couple months. Maybe the total I'll be up there is six to eight weeks. They let me direct episodes so I'm up there at least three weeks for prepping and shooting for those two episodes, and then I pop in occasionally. And our writers' room is down here in Manhattan Beach, so I travel. It's like we have two completely different worlds that exist.
SF: Uh, I don't think we wanted to be there. *Laughs* It was funny, when we were shooting the pilot it was like, "Vancouver 2010" and it was like, "Oh my God, that's so far away, we'll never make it that long!" And then, "Oh cool, we can go to the Olympics!" And as it's gotten closer each year, it's like, "Oh, they've picked us up again." And now it's like, "Oh God!" When we saw the plans that they had for how people were going to get around, it just looked like it could potentially be a nightmare. We just opened up our writers' room last week, but we don't start shooting until April, so we're all avoiding going up there.
SF: Yeah, exactly. It's much easier to watch it. *Laughs* But it's great 'cause we get to be the benefactors of all the great stuff that they've built. I'm all for that. I love that they have the train that goes from the airport to downtown. I think that's genius.
SF: Uh, it's crazy, you know? And I don't understand why they can't get our USA Network up there, but it's really funny. It does help us retain our anonymity up there, which is nice. James (Roday), who is a reluctant TV star, he loves that he can go anywhere and he just likes to blend into a crowd. So for him, he's happy. For me, I drive my wife insane because, when our show's on at 10:00, I cannot watch the episode before I go to bed just because I'll be thinking about it all night, of all the things I could have done or wanted to do or didn't get, or whatever. So I can't even watch the first cut of an episode, otherwise I'll be editing in my head all night.
The only thing that bums me out is that our crew never gets to see what they've done. Every once in a while we'll screen an episode for them and they're like, "Oh my gosh! This is what the show is!" So it's always hard. And we always name characters after people on our crew, or I named a park after Jeff Pleckus, one of our crew members last year, and that episode was just on. I'm like, "Oh, all his friends don't get to see that we named a park after him."
PL: Friends of mine, I keep trying to tell them, "Hey, watch Psych!" It's personally my favourite show on TV, so I tell everyone, and they're like, "I've never heard of it," so I have to keep lending DVDs out or telling them to go buy the DVDs. That's the only way that they can go watch it.
SF: We just watched next Wednesday's episode, which is our Jaws episode. I wanted to do Jaws since the first season. And I co-wrote it. And I was actually inspired by my own episode. *Laughs* This is so lame, I'm so embarrassed, but I'm all pumped up to write my own -- well, see, I'm writing the season premiere.
SF: Yeah, last Tuesday is when we all came into the office to start writing. I do something a little different than other TV shows, I think. I don't know, maybe all other shows do this. But at the end of the season, when we're all done, I add two weeks to the end of the season and we come back and we break stories for the next year. And it's just like "karate", and then they go into China Town, and they go to the bad dojo. Whatever we come up with, and we try to come up with as much as we can. And then, during the two months that you have off, you can start thinking of ideas for that. And some people come back with full-on outlines. We've had people come back with scripts, which is fantastic. So we hit the ground running. While most other people, other shows, are just putting their stuff out on their desks and setting up their pictures, we are already halfway done our stories. It's been really great. This year was great because we broke, like, six stories and then we came back, and then I'm like, "Well, gosh, these aren't like, big, giant, event-type summer episodes," so we've actually broken three more stories this week. And so it's like, "Okay, car racing! Okay, that's cool." So we have a lot of stuff ready to go so early.
SF: Well, more than half our season. It's like, all of a sudden, slots are filling up. I want to do this episode and this episode, and I want to have this character come back, and it's like, "When am I going to be able to do that?" So it's been a great first week. And who knows, at some point we might get burned out, but not yet.
PL: As far as your ongoing storylines, the show is generally pretty episode specific. Things can be contained, people can pick up an episode here and there. But you do have the overlying storylines more relating to Shawn's life, and that sort of thing. Do you kind of plan, for the entire year, how you think things will play out?
SF: Absolutely. We knew where we wanted to get at the end of the season, and we knew where the upcoming season (was headed) way more than ever before, because we're going to move a lot of things forward this season that we've been sort of playing around with. But last year I had, I like to call, "mini-arcs", where it's like, "Gus will do this for these three episodes, and this'll be something that Shawn's dealing with." And we did about half of the stuff that I wanted to, and then the episodes become too full and it's like, "Well, push that back to next year." So there's a lot of stuff from last year that I wanted to do that we're actually going to do this year.
We don't ever want to be a serialized show, where you have to see last week to understand what's going on this week. But I do like those little personal stories that keep it going. And we're doing something to fold Henry into Shawn's life a little more next year as well, which actually takes a lot of attention and a lot of work. The reason I don't like to serialize it too much is that I want people to be able to tune in, but I also want to be able to move an episode that doesn't work as well into a spot that puts the more exciting ones up to the front. But next year it's going to be a lot harder to do that, because we have things that happen in rapid succession that influence the next (episode).
SF: Yeah, exactly. And you know, we're a detective show, and detective shows should be self-contained every week. But you know, I always look back to Magnum, P.I. as my template. Magnum, P.I. always had something that was ongoing and they would hint at it every few episodes. That's what we like to do.
SF: It was Magnum, P.I. -- it was my show growing up, and the show that most influenced me. And what a dream world this guy lives in: living in somebody else's giant house and driving somebody else's car in Hawaii, and has this great life and goes out. He has a friend with a helicopter and they solve crimes. I'm like, "That's what I want to do!" So for me, it was that wish fulfillment kind of thing. And the other thing is that my dad is a police officer, and he used to work security on movie sets. And, when I was growing up, he used to work on Moonlighting a lot. So I used to go down and I used to go see him on the set of Moonlighting, and so I sort of grew up on the set of that show just watching them. And it was so fun, and so funny, and they were so totally unhinged at points and so completely out of control and having so much fun. I'm like, "This is what I want to do with my life." So, those are the two shows that I always wanted to do something like. I'd never done a one-hour show. I'd never done a detective show. I'd never done anything with cops. So it was funny, you know, "Your dad's a cop, how could you never have done anything about cops?" I don't know how to do a regular cop show, so this is about how much I know about cops.
SF: It was a role for our guy not to be a cop but get to act like a cop. He didn't have to go through the training and come up from the ranks. He was a consultant, and he's just a guy who's really good at observing who should have been a cop, who should have done all those things, and chose not to because he and his dad had a falling out. So for me, it was the best of both worlds. You could have the cops and you could also get the guy who still gets to ride his motorcycle and wear jeans. And most importantly to me, it was something different that I've never seen on a detective show before. For me, it's always about -- there's just got to be one thing that makes me say, "I've never seen this before," and then I get excited.
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