Promo 6x08 - "The Tao of Gus"
INTERVISTA James Roday
***According to James Roday, the Psych cast & crew’s new catchphrase is:
“You just gotta Shat up…I don’t care how tired you are or how many hours you spent on set, you just gotta Shat up.”
full interview:
Anything you can tell us about William Shatner’s appearance on Psych this week?
Psych stars, James Roday and Dulé Hill, were over the moon about the Star Trek icon’s guest gig as a con man—and Juliet’s (Maggie Lawson) father. “William Shatner was absolutely fantastic,” Roday told us about Wednesday’s episode. “It was the only time in the six-year history of our show we witnessed crew members coming to set with stuff they wanted signed and nervous to talk to someone.” “He’s a machine,” said Dulé. “We felt a little embarrassed, that [an 80-year-old man] has so much energy—the bar has been set.” “I can never complain about being tired on set again,” Roday joked…before introducing the cast and crew’s new catchphrase: “You just gotta Shat up…I don’t care how tired you are or how many hours you spent on set, you just gotta Shat up.” Love. It.
We’re going to get another “revamped” Theme Song…
You did one of your great theme song revamps for the “Amazing Psych-Man” episode this season … any others planned for season six?
Steve: Oh, my gosh, yes. We did a crazy one for an episode called “Here’s Lassie,” which is our “Shining” episode. Basically, Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) comes to the crime scene of a guy who hung himself and loves the condo that the dead guy lived in and ends up buying it. And it turns out that it’s basically like “The Shining” (hotel).
And we revamped the theme song in this old 1920s kind of spooky, “Shining” flashback style. It has this sort of backward thing, you hear the sort of 1920s version of (mimics old-timey singing voice), “I know, you know.” It’s really cool.
You’ve had so many great guest stars … do you keep a big running list in the writers room?
Yeah, actually we have a whiteboard in our office of people to bring back, people that we want to get, people that we’ve heard have expressed interest in the show. And we also keep a list of people we’ll never get, just for fun.
Like who?
Well, I don’t know if I should say, because if I say it, maybe it will actually stop it. But we’ve actually — we’ve had Martin Sheen at the top of our list for a while. And because he and Dule worked together on “The West Wing,” it always seems like we’re really close to getting him, and then there’s always something that falls through. So it seems that Martin Sheen got jokingly moved to our “We’ll Never Get” list. (Laughing)
Do you have a specific storyline in mind for him?
Yeah. Well, in fact, Martin has actually pitched us the storyline. It’s just a matter of working it out for him to do it. And he actually was one of the top (contenders) for playing Juliet’s dad, too. And we also considered him for Father Wesley (played by Ray Wise), but he said he was too good of a Catholic to do that.
Steve lets us know what’s happening…
Season six is airing now, but have you filmed the whole season or are you still working on it?
We’ve wrapped and we’ve mixed. Not only have we shot everything, we’ve mixed everything … except that we have extended versions of our “Indiana Shawn” episode, which is our “Indiana Jones” episode, and James’ “The Shining” episode, which both will air at the beginning of the second half of the season. We’re doing extended versions for the DVDs, and we’re mixing those on Thursday. And then we’re done, done. There’s like nothing else to do except for wait for USA to finally give us our pick-up.
I was just going to ask about that … is it really still up in the air?
You know what? We’ve heard that it’s almost impossible not to happen. And we’ve actually done tremendously well in the fall. We’ve actually been the top-rated scripted (cable) show a couple of (times), I think two out of the last three weeks. So we’re feeling that we’re doing very well in a very competitive environment. And so we aren’t brazenly overconfident about it, but we’re just hoping that we can finally tell all our crew people in Canada that we have a date and we’re starting again.
And “Psych” is the longest-running show on the network, the fans are still really into it and, as you said, the ratings are good, so it’s tough to see how you wouldn’t be back for a seventh season.
Yeah, exactly. And I imagine we should probably hear very soon. And I would be incredibly shocked if we didn’t. So hopefully I would know very soon.
A lot of shows have gotten tripped up with long-simmering romances that finally come to fruition, but the Shawn/Juliet pairing hasn’t hurt the show at all. How have you avoided that, and could you go as far as having them get married without hurting the show?
I think we absolutely can. What I saw as a problem of the “will they/won’t they?” is that once they do, you can’t make it the whole show.
It has to just be part of. So Shawn and Juliet finally coming together has to have its proper place. You don’t want it to get annoying to people. Fans were pulling for these characters to get together, and we brought them together, and then we just said, “You know what? People get together, and it doesn’t change who they are in most ways.”
It creates problems in their lives, and those are the things that we try to hit on, just like that was our great way into the Shatner episode. Shawn, who’s still sometimes infantile in his understanding of relationships, thinks that all women want is for men to come in and fix their problems. Shawn says, “Listen, when a woman says one thing, she wants you to do another.” And to me, that’s really funny, and that’s really fun. It’s something we can hook a lot of great bits onto. But if we ever did a string of three episodes where Shawn and Juliet break up, and then they’re pining for each other, and there’s long, slow musical montages, I think people would get annoyed with it.
