Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
As fun as being scared out of your skin is, not everyone wants to delve into the world of horror media during the Halloween season. Plenty of people won’t be caught dead anywhere near a Scream marathon or in a theater to see the new Exorcist—yours truly included—but that doesn’t mean that the spirit of Halloween goes completely ignored. The blood-rush of fear goes hand in hand with hilarity and camp every year, and if there is one show that manages to give us a little thrill while still making sure to get some laughs in, it’s Psych.
The fake-psychic-detective-comedy aired on USA for eight seasons between 2006 and 2014, and while there is both a DVD and a collection of episodes on Peacock that bare the “Psych-O-Ween” branding, it is more than fair to say that the entire show is the perfect thing to watch while carving pumpkins or getting a costume together.
Shawn Spencer’s long-con on the Santa Barbara Police Department starts out with him solving a kidnapping and a murderous spelling bee cheating scandal, and from the moment he lies to them about his supposed powers, nothing is serious. He commits to the longest bit of all time just to avoid getting arrested (for something he didn’t even do), and there are a plethora of episodes that are written in that same vein. Defined by its staple film references, Psych toes a line between comedy, crime drama, campy horror, and earnest heart. As for its spookiest outings, “Shawn (and Gus) of the Dead,” “Tuesday the 17th,” and “Not Even Close Encounters” are just a few of the episodes that parody the classic movies that they are named after, but Psych’s most spine-tingling episodes rarely ever end up on must-watch “Psych-O-Ween” lists: the Yin/Yang finale trilogy.
Taking place across three different season finales spanning from Season 3 to Season 5, the Yin/Yang trilogy presents Shawn with his most challenging and personal adversaries. Threading together three episodes that each air a season apart is challenging enough, but Psych sets a tonal thread through the trilogy that makes binging the five seasons that lead up to the final episode worth it. The episode that introduced us to the first member of the Yin/Yang duo, “An Evening with Mr. Yang,” presents a situation where a psychotic serial killer runs Shawn, Gus, and the SBPD around in circles. Ally Sheedy’s Mr. Yang is one of the most interesting unhinged serial killers to come out of a crime series, drama or comedy, resulting in an unforgettable and fun performance.
Its follow-up “Mr. Yin Presents”takes that and blows it out of the water. Sure, a part of the suspense hinges on the Hitchcock references the episode makes, but a reference is nothing without some substance behind it. With allusions to the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 4’s 16th episode does an incredible job of parodying a number of Hitchcock films while keeping us on our toes about whether or not everyone is going to make it out of Mr. Yin’s deadly set-ups alive. By the time things have wrapped up, we have seen the death of a character that, for all intents and purposes, should have been a quirky one-off and instead becomes the episode’s emotional core. That death is followed by a race against the clock for two more characters facing terrifying potential murders, and, even with the comedy that comes standard in Psych, the episode feels more like a crime drama-thriller than anything else.
The final episode of the trilogy, “Yang 3 in 2D,” reveals that Mr. Yin is played by Peter Weller, who does an incredible job with the small amount of screentime he has. His voice alone lends itself to making him an unnerving figure, but even as one of the scariest figures in the Psych mythos, he still leans into the humor of the show without letting us forget the fact that he’s about to murder Shawn and Gus. And while it’s probably for the best that the Psych writers’ room didn’t run the Yin/Yang storyline into the ground, Sheedy and Weller are undoubtedly two of the best villains of the week that the show ever saw.
It wouldn’t be fair to talk about the episodes that are coincidentally the most thrilling without talking about the episodes that are actually intended to be centered around Halloween. Scary Sherry: Bianca’s Toast has the team investigating a series of Halloween-timed murders in a sorority house, Tuesday the 17th parodies Friday the 13th, and there are multiple episodes that hinge on the idea that something is haunted—whether it be a house or a theme park ride. The ridiculousness of Psych’s premise lends itself to the show being Scooby-Doo-like at times, even when the initial suspicions about the case of the week aren’t anything supernatural. A psychic, fake or not, is a mystical concept, and the fake aspect lends itself to a constant level of camp and silliness that works well regardless of the tonal differences between each episode.
While a full blown rewatch of Psych might not be totally justified when fall rolls around, any of the episodes are delightful Halloween fodder. It lands at a perfect middle ground for crime media that no other show has managed to find. Most of the time, Psych is more about the antics of how a case is solved rather than the crime itself, and that’s what makes it such a great show. It was never afraid to present us with something slightly nonsensical for the sake of a laugh, and if that doesn’t scream Halloween, I don’t know what else does.
