"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."

 November 30, 2010

A Series Homage Lovingly Wrapped in Plastic

By MIKE HALE

By 11 p.m. on Wednesday (10 p.m., Central), the people who catalog such things will have already ferreted out and posted the many homages to "Twin Peaks" in "Dual Spires," the new episode of "Psych" on USA that will have just ended.

The allusions appear nearly nonstop, from the obvious — a girl's body wrapped in plastic, a sheriff named after an American president, a damn fine cup of cider — to the slightly more subtle, like silent drape runners, the letter J and Chris Isaak's voice on the soundtrack.

"Psych," a resolutely silly comedy-mystery starring James Roday as a fake-psychic police consultant, makes a practice of referring to old movies and television shows, and has frequently joked about "Twin Peaks." But "Dual Spires" goes past affection to obsession, which seems appropriate when you're saluting one of the weirdest television series ever to survive for 30 episodes in prime time.

Mr. Roday and Dulé Hill, as the crime fighters Shawn and Gus, travel to the strange town of Dual Spires and are caught up in the mystery of who killed Paula Merral. (The name is an anagram of Laura Palmer, the dead girl of "Twin Peaks.") The "Psych" opening has been redone in somber "Twin Peaks" style, with images from Southern California rather than the Pacific Northwest — a seagull replaces the thrush — and the "Psych" theme song has been rerecorded by Julee Cruise, the chanteuse of the "Twin Peaks" roadhouse.

A clutch of "Twin Peaks" actors, including regulars like Ray Wise, Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn and Dana Ashbrook, has been reunited for "Dual Spires," and the episode's best moments involve their spoofing the parts that made them famous. In one moment that's actually spooky — something you don't expect from the jokey, often tinny "Psych" — the camera pans up from the face of Paula Merral to the face of the coroner, and it's Ms. Lee, the original Laura Palmer, in effect looking down at her own corpse.

It might seem like a long way down from "Twin Peaks" to "Psych," and it's a little irritating how "Dual Spires" milks laughs from the overwrought reactions of the townspeople to Paula's death. While it may strike some contemporary viewers as hokey, not many things on television have been as brilliantly constructed or portrayed as the crescendo of grief in the "Twin Peaks" pilot.

"Twin Peaks" expands in the memory, however; it's easy to forget that the atmosphere of dreamy menace and the pitch-perfect sendup of 1950s-'60s soap opera — "Peyton Place" in the cocaine age — were largely absent after the two-hour pilot directed byDavid Lynch, who created the series with Mark Frost. By Episode 3 the weirdness had set in, that supernatural-surreal vaudeville that defined the show while dragging it down; Mr. Lynch would perfect it later in the underrated film "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" and particularly in "Mulholland Drive."

The "Psych" episode, billed as a 20th-anniversary tribute, comes 20 years to the day after the 16th episode of "Twin Peaks" (17th, if you count the pilot). That was the one that answered the question of who killed Laura Palmer, after which there was really no reason to keep watching. Someone involved with "Psych" was watching, though: "Dual Spires" includes references to really obscure, late-second-season stuff like Windom Earle and the Black Lodge.

Tribute episodes have some value for gluttonous fans and idea-starved writers — witness the recent elaborate salutes by "Castle" and "Supernatural," just days apart, to "The X Files," the best American television show of the 1990s and one that's hard to imagine without the previous existence of "Twin Peaks." The best thing about "Dual Spires" would be for it to drive viewers back to the "Twin Peaks" pilot, which is available from iTunes and on the "Definitive Gold Box Edition" DVD set. (Other Season 1 DVD packages do not include the pilot.) It's the only way really to appreciate the fleeting scene in "Dual Spires" of a woman (Catherine Coulson, as it happens) carrying a log.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/arts/television/01psych.html?_r=1