You'd never guess from its present state of decay that "Psych" was once such a clever and endearing show

The evidence suggests that Shawn and Gus are beyond saving.

"Let me apologize for Gus's behavior. It's juvenile and not very likable."

-- Shawn (James Roday), about best his friend, Gus (Dulé Hill),
in the Psych episode "Shawn and the Real Girl"

by Ken

I'm sorry to have to say that what "psychic detective" Shawn Spencer says about his childhood best friend, Burton "Gus" Guster, has become lamentably true. However, it passes over the disturbing reality that Shawn's behavior" has regressed from juvenile to infantile, and he has leapfrogged from "not very likable" to positively loathsome.

This weekend I finally caught up on the four new Psych episodes piled up on my DVR. (Officially, I see, they're known to USA Network as Episodes 10-13 of Season 6, continuing from October-December.) Whatever force kept me from watching any of these episodes sooner turns out to have known whereof it was forcing. I think it's no exaggeration to say that these episodes were uniformly appallingly awful. It was all the more discouraging that the "super-sized" first of them, "Indiana Shawn and the Temple of the Kinda Crappy, Rusty Old Dagger," was written and directed by series creator Steve Franks, which would seem to certify that this is where he thinks the show is these days.

In fact, I was all set to delete the show from my DVR's automatic-recording list when I noticed online that the next new episode, coming up Wednesday, focuses on Kurt Fuller's Woody the coroner, whose sleazy crassness (or is it crass sleaziness? I think it works either way) provides me my only moments of pleasure these days.

It matters quite a lot that Shawn and Gus have become so utterly unlikable, because the charm of Psych has always been the likability of its characters -- that and the central conceit that it's easier for Shawn, who grew up being trained in fastidious forensic observation by his former-police-lieutenant father, Henry Spencer (Corbin Bernsen, who in the earlier seasons was simply sublime, laying the groundwork, I wrote here, for a whole new career as a character actor), to get people to believe that he's psychic than that he is so compulsively observant and so skilled at deducing dazzling deductions from his observations.

Of course there was always a risk in building a show around a boy who's too old to continue being a boy, and is getting older year by year. Even more dangerously the show's creative team allowed Shawn to win the romantic interest of Santa Barbara Det. Juliet O'Hara (Maggie Lawson). The more Shawn regresses instead of advancing, the more bewildering, even alarming, it is that someone as smart and competent and attractive as Jules could allow herself even to contemplate a relationship with him.

The other quote I scribbled down during my weekend Psych-watching was bit of dialogue involving Jules's crook-father, Frank O'Hara -- a return appearance by William Shatner in the second new episode, "Heeeeere's Lassie." Rather than return Shawn's phone call, Frank has simply shown up in Santa Barbara.

SHAWN: I left you that message a week ago. Where were you?
FRANK: Tanzania.
GUS: You climbed Kilimanjaro?
SHAWN: Gus, don't make up words. What were you doing in Australia, Frank?

As The Simpsons' Nelson would say, "Har har." You get it? Shawn doesn't know what Kilimanjaro is! Har har! Plus he chastises Gus for making stuff up! Har har! Plus, he thinks this place Frank has announced is in Australia! Har har! Oh, that Shawn, what a goof!

Um, no. Even if any of it was believable, it wouldn't be amusing, or much of anything else. Yet what was most alarming was that there was, as far as I could tell (but then, I acknowledge that by then I wasn't watching exactly carefully), no reason for Frank O'Hara to have turned up, except the fact that Shawn had indeed left him a message when he was contemplating proposing to Jules. But his appearance had nothing to do with this show, and worse still, wasn't interesting, or humorous, or anything else I could determine. "Gratuitous" was the word that leapt to mind. I guess it was an opportunity to slip pop-culture iconette Shatner into the guest cast, and offer regular viewers a little "in" joke (minus the joke part).

About the only remaining pleasure of Psych is Kurt Fuller's wacky-sleazy Woody the coroner. It's something, but not much.

I don't know anything about the show's ratings, and I guess I would be still more alarmed to learn that any appreciable number of viewers are still tuning in. (Why?) Unlike USA's In Plain Sight, which is formally announced as being in its final season, nobody involved with Psych seems to have summoned the resoluteness to pull the plug on this ghastly ghost of its former clever, vital self.

I don't know if it qualifies as irony, or just a fact of life, but so far the new episodes of In Plain Sight (which, I noticed, far from leaving languishing on the DVR, I pounced on) have been terrific -- not only finding serviceable new plot lines (is the Psych creative team even trying?) but advancing the lives of its equally terrific set of characters in believable and interesting ways.

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This "In Plain Sight" performance highlighted one difference between cable and broadcast network drama

In the episode "Second Crime Around," Mary had to deal with her least favorite kind of witness, a con man -- meet Ronnie McIntire (Maury Sterling).

by Ken

Phew! Sorry, folks, I tried to find a little clip, like even a preview, to show you an actor new to me, Maury Sterling, as con man Ronnie McIntire on Episode 5, "Second Crime Around," of the current season of USA's In Plain Sight, but I just couldn't find it. Hey, I had a tough enough time finding the names of the character and the actor! (You'd think that would be the absolutely most basic information you could find on a website, or at any rate I would, but uh-uh. Is the moronic crap you find on most TV-show websites really what fans want to find there? (Don't answer that. I don't want to know.)

Anyway, the reason I hoped to show you a bit of Maury Sterling as con man Ronnie is that his performance struck me as a delicious example of what the good cable drama shows -- and, come to think of it, even some of the cable comedies -- are doing so much better these days than most network shows: casting really good actors and allowing them, maybe even encouraging them (but I'll settle for allowing) to really make their characters vivid and believable. A crucial part of the premise of this episode is that there's nothing Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack) hates worse than a con man, of which the Witness Protection Program unfortunately absorbs its scoundrel-y share. And the writers created a really loathsome specimen, a man who utterly without remorse, in fact with a great deal of gusto (this is a man who loves his "work"), scams old folks out of their life's savings.

None of which would have counted for much if the producers hadn't found an actor to really fill the role. Enter Maury. He gave us, without sentimentality or apology (and certainly without a mitigation) a con man who really loves his "work" -- an utterly vile and unreservedly loathsome being brought vividly to life without softening or caricature. This is something it seems to me you just don't see so much on the big-budget broadcast-network dramas, where the obsession with Q-ratings and bland prettiness tends to reduce characters like Ronnie to labels. Which we accept, by and large, because we're used to the game. Oh yes, that one is The Villain, boo! Yawn.

It's when you see performances like Maury's -- or, for that matter, like everyone in the cast of AMC's Mad Men or Breaking Bad that you realize how different things can be when the producers and writers have more freedom to just concentrate on the work, not satisfying the network suits. I assume that the cable networks have suits too. They don't seem to have quite the clout of their broadcast-network counterparts. At least not yet!

And this month and next a whole slew of my favorite cable dramas are having season premieres -- we're definitely past the era when summer TV meant the doldrums.

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The "superseded" scripts of USA's "In Plain Sight" are more interesting than most shows' final ones

In last week's episode of In Plain Sight, "Crazy Like a Witness," Bradley Whitford played a black-ops-type specialist who goes into Witness Protection with his son and is persuaded that his old company is out to get him. Episode 3 of Season 4 airs tonight at 10pm ET on USA Network, with the usual all-week repeats.

by Ken

Two episodes into the new season (with the third up tonight), it has been great having USA Network's In Plain Sight back. The creative team has by now established the personal and professional lives of Witness Protection marshal Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack) so solidly that they have a wide range of opportunities to play with. In an ingenious turnaround from previous seasons, Mary has to grapple with the possibility that her alcoholic screw-up mother (Lesley Ann Warren) and her perennial blond bombshell screw-up sister Brandi (Nichole Hiltz) may actually have straightened their lives out, and maybe she can't keep blaming the mess of her own personal life on always having to deal with theirs.

Meanwhile at work Mary remains Mary. In the season-opening episode, as her boss, Stan (Paul Ben-Victor), the regional WITSEC director, interviewed candidates for a new deputy director, the eventual winning candidate got her foot in the door by declaring herself up to the job of dealing with "the Mary Shannon problem." And the relationship between Mary and her fellow marshal Marshall is so well laid out that we know its boundaries, which means that we can also be surprised when they're breached.

BUT THAT WASN'T WHAT I WANTED
TO TALK ABOUT, EXACTLY

As the show is normally structured, near the start and at the end of each episode there is an establishing and then a summing up of Mary and the Albuquerque WITSEC office's relationship with the the episode's witness, done in part with voiceover narration by Mary. What anyone who has used the show's closed captions discovers is that for these opening and closing voiceovers, the actual voiceover and the CCs come from fundamentally different versions of the script.

We're not talking about the usual, expectable deviations between CCs and actual dialogue. We're not even talking about one version being a rewrite of the other. (Presumably the version in the CCs would represent an earlier script stage, since the version that's broadcast is, after all, the version that's broadcast.) We're talking about different scripts.

By way of demonstration, I made my best effort to transcribe both versions from last week's episode, the second of Season 4, "Crazy Like a Witness." By way of background:

* Bradley Whitford plays an ex-Army dark-ops "fixer" type who had been working his "magic" for a Blackwater-type firm, Genesis, until he turned whistleblower over corrupt dealings by the company and its omniscient chief -- a typically absorbing performance by that wonderful character actor John de Lancie. At this point Adam's wife is killed in a hit-and-run, and as Adam and his high-school-age son go into Witness Protection, Adam's conviction that his old boss had her hit, and that his son is now in danger, comes to seem pathological to the people dealing with him, with the notable exception of Marshall.

* At the same time Mary is dealing with the indications that her seemingly hopeless sister Brandi really has straightened herself out, and really will marry the incredibly decent, not to mention prosperous, guy (Joshua Malina) who seems genuinely crazy about her.

Now I'm not going to make any attempt to key the voiceovers to the action unfolding on-screen. You have the general idea of the setup, so here is --

THE EPISODE-ESTABLISHING (EARLY-SHOW) VOICEOVER

ACTUALLY BROADCAST VOICEOVER

MARY: For all five years of high school, Brandi could never get off the phone. It didn't matter which guy, it was always the same. "You hang up." "No, you hang up." It took all I had not to rip the phone out of the wall. I never got that -- the unquenchable thirst for hanging up.

In my experience, holding out for closure does nothing but prolong the pain. The Stones got it right. Lance the boil, rip off the Band-Aid, and get on with it.

CLOSED-CAPTION VERSION

MARY: When relationships break apart, we naturally look to clean up the broken pieces, tie up loose ends, leave no emotion unexpressed.

For a person entering Witness Protection, this need for closure seems prerequisite to starting life anew.

In my experience, seeking closure only prolongs the pain. The Stones got it right. Lance the boil, rip off the Band-Aid, and get on with it.

THE EPISODE-SUMMING-UP (END-OF-SHOW) VOICEOVER

By the end of the show, nearly everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, except that neither Adam nor his son has been injured, and since they have ceased to become a threat to Genesis, their lives no longer appear to be in danger.

ACTUALLY BROADCAST VOICEOVER

MARY: [PART 1] One of my earliest memories was of a beachfront and a flagpole, and of lightning flashes headed for the shore. As grownups ran around, frantic, gathering beach towels, flip-flops, and five-year-olds, one kid in particular went racing toward the storm.

[PART 2] I watched that five-year-old at the beachfront clinging wide-eyed to the flagpole as pretty bolts of lightning lit the sky. Then his mom ran out -- or a lifeguard, or an aunt -- and pulled him down to ground [???], to live another day.

[PART 3] As with most things, hanging onto a flagpole is, in the end, a matter of balance a [???] to keep you steady while you stay alert for lightning, of the storms across the sea.

CLOSED-CAPTION VERSION

MARY: [PART 1] Day after day we struggle to get things right, desperate to sidestep the mistakes of the past. We rearrange our lives against the unforeseen, arming ourselves against what we cannot know.

[PART 2] You see it on the news every night. The tornado blowing off the plain, tectonic under ["one's feet"? -- can't read my writing], a bridge in the middle, scattered debris and kindling where a home used to be.

[PART 3] A wise man once said, "With one foot in yesterday and another in tomorrow, all we do is piss on today." Instead of grasping at straws, or grains of sand, we're better off throwing up our hands and living in the here and the now.

NOW DO YOU GET WHAT I'M SAYING?

As you can see, the "actually broadcast" version isn't a revise, or even a rewrite, of the version contained in the CCs. They aren't even necessarily going for the same point(s).

They're so different that it occurred to me belatedly that there might be some online chatter on the subject, and sure enough I found a thread on exactly this subject, from May 2010, in which a number of posters make exactly the points I've made above.

And wouldn't you know, they're sneeringly dismissed by a jerkwad who flaunts his self-professed inside knowledge of the closed-captioning process. The idea that the captioners could be working from a different script, he tells them patronizingly, is simply impossible, because that's not how the captioning process is done. It's done by transcription; the captioners never so much as see a script, and therefore all they can be talking about is minor transcription errors. Like, presumably the minor deviations in the parallel versions above.

Closed captions are often truncated to reflect what can be read in roughly the same amount of time as the spoken dialogue that's captioned. They have nothing to do with script changes; STTR's do most captioning.

What you're seeing is quite commonplace on television shows. The WGBH Foundation did most captioning at one point, but there are a number of groups now. Complaints should be directed to the FCC, although I'm not sure accuracy of captioning is all that high on their agenda.

You assume I don't use captions, or know the difference between truncation and alteration. I can't account for what you see on IPS, nor is this an argument I care to have. I just know how CC is done, and that it is done using STTR's who never see actual scripts. You've pronounced me wrong, so there's nothing more I can contribute.

I wouldn't call it an argument, just differing views. I have professional knowledge of how closed captioning works, and trust me, the captioners never see the scripts. As fun as it is to think the differences reflect changes made by the writers, they don't. Moreover, captioning is done in post-production, long after the final changes to the script are made, and the episode filmed.

It doesn't matter how often Jerkwad (not his/her actual screen name) is corrected, with actual examples presented. He has "professional knowledge of how closed captioning works." The only tiny problem is that, at least as regards the question raised regarding In Plain Sight, every single word he writes is 100 percent wrong.

As he would know if he simply listened to what he's being told. But I guess people with "professional knowledge" don't have to pay attention to reality.

BY THE WAY, ONE POSTER ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTES

In fact, cerulean's was the very first response to the original query:

In my experience, that is very common. The script changes after the closed captioning is recorded is my guess. They fixed it for the dvds of In Plain Sight, at least for the first two seasons. The X-Files was notorious for this practice.

I usually watch the closed captions to find these discrepancies, which I find interesting, as they give insight into script changes, but I am a freak. However, I agree that the captions should be adjusted to reflect the actual dialogue (although I have found most of the discrepancies to be in the narration in the case of In Plain Sight).

I also find it interesting to note that the closed captioning often edits profanity, when the spoken dialogue does not.

Maybe somebody has come up with an answer since May 2010, but then, here we are with a new season, and the same thing is still happening. Personally, I don't mind. I wish I understood what's going on, but like cerulean I find myself fascinated being able to see such different script versions. Again, it's hard to avoid the assumption that the CC version represents an earlier stage, simply because you'd have to assume the "actually broadcast" version is the "final" one. But I'm fascinated by this glimpse of a writing process that (episode after episode) includes such interestingly different versions. The rejected, or perhaps we should say superseded, versions are more interesting than the writing we find on an awful lot of shows.

As for our friend Jerkwad, well, he does indeed appear to be a professional at that.


UPDATE: NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL ACTION

I got home late and just finished watching tonight's In Plain Sight episode, "Love in the Time of Colorado" (was that a humdinger of an episode?), and man, my post goes up at 9pm ET making a federal case of this dual-script business, and an hour later USA sends out the new episode with the right CCs for the episode as aired! Okay, in the wrap-up scene the CCs were mis-synched, but look how little time they had to shape this episode up.

Now that I know I have this power, maybe next I'll go after all that mind-numbingly crappy music on Tremé. True, if HBO took all that stuff out, each episode would shrink to about eight minutes, but would that necessarily be a terrible thing? They could devote the rest of the hour to previews of upcoming HBO vampire-zombie-Mormon shows.

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USA Network's superior crime shows really do live by that slogan "Characters Welcome"

"When Mary Met Marshall": In last week's episode of USA Network's In Plain Sight, we witnessed the less-than-magical first meeting in 2003 of present-day WITSEC colleagues Marshall Mann (Frederick Weller) and sarcastic, generally misanthropic Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack).

"This week sees the season premieres of USA's Law & Order: Criminal Intent (yesterday's debut, introducing a new detective played by Saffron Burrows, marked the beginning of season 9) and In Plain Sight (starting its third season today). Both series feature USA doing what it does best: offering quirky crimefighters who nail bad guys even as their own lives are falling apart."

-- Gary Susman, in a March 31 AOL "Inside TV" post,

"How USA Network Found Its Groove"

by Ken

Meanwhile, tonight Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio joins the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent as the Major Case Squad's new captain, as the show moves toward completion of a near-total cast turnover since the show migrated from NBC to USA Network last season. One of the perceptive points Gary Susman makes in the above-referenced post, written for the season premieres of L&O: CI (now Tuesday nights at 10pm ET) and In Plain Sight (now Wednesday nights at 10pm) is that even this fugitive from Dick Wolf's Law & Order plant, which seems not to fit the mold of the USA-created shows he's writing about, was nudged closer with the introduction of the quirky Jeff Goldblum as one of the male detectives -- not surprisingly, a quirky detective.

We're two episodes into those new seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT) and In Plain Sight (Wednesdays at 10pm ET/PT) on USA Network, and they're both going swimmingly. In Plain Sight, created by David Maples, is coming off perhaps its most memorable episode, telling in parallel a troubled couple's 2003 entry into the witness-protection program and its present-day crisis, the point of fascination being that the first encounter between Mary and Marshall and their extremely uneasy first collaboration. It was, I think, everything we fans of these outstanding characters might have hoped for.

I've been wanting to write about the USA series, which now include Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and White Collar as well, but it's not easy to describe what's so good about them except that they're built around really memorable and audience-involving characters and that they're really well written and acted. And that seems so obvious as to be hardly worth saying.

Which may be why I have trouble letting go of Gary Susman's piece. He seems to think it's easy to explain the USA series. The network, he says, has a formula

The network's quirky crimefighter formula goes back to Monk, which debuted in 2002. (Actually, it goes back even further, to NBC's Columbo, in which Peter Falk's rumpled gumshoe could barely keep his trenchcoat clean or his jalopy running but managed nonetheless to trip up murderers with his disarming manner and his annoying attention to detail.) With Adrian Monk, played to Emmy-winning perfection by Tony Shalhoub, USA had a sleuth whose obsessive-compulsive disorder made him nearly impossible to get along with but also made him a brilliantly deductive detective. It also made him very funny. The juxtaposition of Monk's meticulous pursuit of criminals with his shambles of a private life made the show a pioneering comedy, one that satisfied mystery lovers while reassuring viewers that each week's menace was low-stakes enough that they didn't have to worry too much about the characters' fates. It was crime-caper comfort food, and it provided USA with a hit that gave the long-faceless network an identifiable brand. The series finale, in December 2009, drew 9.4 million viewers, setting a record as the most-watched episode of a scripted cable series.

The basic description of Monk, created by Andy Breckman, is terrific, including the hark-back to Peter Falk's justly celebrated Columbo. What's objectionable to the point of being nonsensical is the notion that there is any kind of "formula" at work here. You would think that an observer as canny as Susman shows himself would hear the alarm bells going off with the Columbo reference. If there were indeed a formula at work here, you would expect to have found Columbo not only widely but successfully imitated.

In fact, about the only instance that pops to mind is Murder, She Wrote and Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher. By astonishing coincidence, Murder, She Wrote was created by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link in collaboration with Peter S. Fischer, and the "formula" consisted of a memorable central character and audience-involving supporting ones, with many, many seasons' worth of solid casting and writing. (For extra credit, list the shows that have successfully copied the Murder, She Wrote "formula.")

The fact is that much of what Susman claims is part and parcel of the Monk "formula" isn't true of some or all of the other USA shows. I can see, for example, how Monk could be considered "crime-caper comfort food," which "satisfied mystery lovers while reassuring viewers that each week's menace was low-stakes enough that they didn't have to worry too much about the characters' fates." But first off, of what TV crime series is this not true? It's one of those facts of life of series TV. The regular cast members are safe unless one is being written out of the show, in which case there's apt to have been so much advance publicity that it still comes as not much of a surprise. And this is as true of, say, the dreadful CSI shows as of anything on USA.

(So why are so many people watching the CSI crapfests? Perhaps CBS has a vast network of field operatives paying people to watch, or at least claim to watch, them? Or perhaps, with those tiresome plots cloaked in all that technical mumbo-jumbo, they've found a hitherto untapped audience of folks whose only available entertainment alternative is staring at a blank wall?)

Surprisingly, although Susman takes ample note of the fact that Monk was a comedy, and a very funny one, it doesn't seem to occur to him to stress this as USA's "formula." The network has chosen to make its crime-caper series funny. It was one of the things that popped out of the pilot of Burn Notice, created by Matt Nix and starring Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, a CIA agent who has inexplicably been "burned" -- dismissed and abandoned in Miami. The show is hilarious, not least for Michael's brilliantly ingenious narration, and also for the remarkable supporting cast -- we'll talk more about this before the new season begins, in June.

The notion of "formula" says that these shows are something anyone could do, by simply popping interchangeable elements into the formulaic pattern. To me, this triumphantly misses the entire point of what the USA shows have done, which is to create memorable characters, which obviously means hiring really good actors, and writing well for them.

"USA's slogan was 'Characters Welcome,'" Susman writes, "but it soon became clear that all the new lead characters were going to be variations on Adrian Monk." I'm thinking that in his determination to "gotcha" USA, to ferret out hidden truths, he's overlooked the obvious. What USA does so well is to live by that slogan: "Characters Welcome." TV, after all, is basically a character-driven medium. The "Characters Welcome" thing is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well, and a quite extraordinary thing when it's done well.

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