Collectively We Do Not Give Nearly Enough Attention To Because Of You Shawn I Killed The State Bird.

collectively we do not give nearly enough attention to “because of you shawn i killed the state bird”. like i wanna hear the rest of that story so bad

uh, well, uh-

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

the running bit of shawn being an excellent shot but entering every single Very Dangerous Situation completely unarmed is so fun because it just contains so many multitudes within it. practical interpretation? has a criminal record & california gun laws are relatively strict. personality wise? silly little pacifist with no sense of self preservation. meta narratively? the main character and he knows it. archetypally? sets him apart from the cops. funniest interpretation? cosmic forces at play in the universe think shawn and his fraudulent psychic schtick are deeply funny. hes actually just too touched by god to ever need a weapon to survive; a spiritually unkillable guy.

The universe is indifferent. We ought not to be.

The Shawn & Gus dynamic in Psych is so subtly yet beautifully shaped by the fact that they cast a naturally deadpan introvert to play the world's most hyperactive attention-seeking detective, then cast a chronic theater kid to play his supposedly boring, reasonable best friend