After The West Wing ended, we followed actor Dulé Hill over to a show called Psych. It’s a comedy about a guy named Shawn who was trained by his father from birth to notice tiny clues and solve crimes. (Dulé Hill plays the sidekick, Gus) Because he’s so good at noticing things that other people don’t notice, people mistake him for a psychic. Shawn capitalizes on this by pretending to actually be psychic and to help the police department solve crimes.

It’s a good show. I mean, it is what it is, a sort of witty, pop-culture referencing, slacker comedy entirely based on the joke that Shawn must play-act and pretend to be psychic to keep the charade going. It’s sort of like Monk, or any number of humorous, throw away episode mystery shows, where you don’t need to turn your brain on too much and you don’t need to see every episode to know what’s going on.

After the show had been on for a few years over on the USA network, a new show, The Mentalist, premiered on CBS. The premise of the show seems to be more or less identical to psych, other than the fact that it is a drama instead of a comedy, and that the main character is smarmy and annoying and British, and everybody calls him by his last name, “Jane”, which is girly. The two shows seemed so similar that I thought perhaps the people responsible for Psych had decided to repackage the idea a little bit for a much wider audience on a much bigger network. It seemed to work too, since the Mentalist apparently has a huge audience and has won some awards. However, lately Psych has been taking some digs at the Mentalist, leading me to believe they were not part of the deal. Here is a transcript from a recent promo:

Shawn: “You’ve seen the mentalist, right?”
Dude: “Yes.”
Shawn: “It’s like that.”
Gus: “Except that guy is a fake.”
Shawn: “Right, if I was a fake psychic, it would be eerily similar.”
Gus: “Exactly the same.”
Shawn: “A virtual carbon copy.”

So obviously, they’re not too thrilled. But The Mentalist can’t have just stolen the idea, right? Everybody would notice that. Or is CBS just big enough to bully USA around when they like? Has that ever happened before, that another network just blatantly steals an idea from another? I mean, if the Mentalist really is better than Psych (it’s not), then what can USA say? Waaa, you took our idea and made it better!

So I guess the only thing that can be done, is that I can get the word out there. So don’t watch The Mentalist, watch Psych instead.