At the beginning of this year, I had decided to compartmentalize my book blogging from my TV blogging, and set up a new blog at theladydetective.wordpress.com to host my book reviews. That means, I will no longer be posting monthly reading logs on this site.
So I thought, why not instead continue my monthly blogging ritual, but focus instead on mystery TV shows and movies I watched.
With that in mind, below are the mystery things I’ve been watching this past month:
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Psych
I recently (meaning several months ago) finally decided to sign up for Amazon Prime, and so one of the things I’ve been doing is discovering the shows available for streaming through that service.
Psych is one of those shows that I’ve been recently hearing a lot about. It has a very dedicated fan base that is fairly vocal online and on social media. People who love the show, love it a lot. And they’re particularly excited about the second movie sequel to the show that’s coming out later this year (Psych 2: Lassie Come Home).
The protagonists of the show are two friends who run a Psychic Detective agency and are sometimes hired as consultants for the Santa Barbara Police Department. Sean Spencer pretends to be a psychic when in fact he’s just super observant, and his friend Gus helps him out by his own special skill set that includes being a super-sniffer and pharmaceutical rep who knows a lot about obscure drugs and their side-effects.
I can’t say enough about how glad I am to discover the show now. Mystery shows nowadays tend towards a hard-boiled/gritty mood. And while there’s a murder to solve in every episode of Psych, it’s approach to the genre is very cozy so that each episodes is injected with some light-hearted humour. This is the show I put on whenever I need something to put me in a good mood.
The show had its original run from 2006 until 2014 on USA Network, also known for producing the series MONK, starring Tony Shalhoub.
Click here to stream Psych on Amazon Prime.
Or Click here to purchase Psych on DVD.
House (a.k.a. House, M.D.)
The other show I’ve been bingeing a lot lately is House.
I’ve been meaning to watch the show for a while. I never watched it during its original run (which was 2004 to 2012), although I know it was very popular and my sister would never miss an episode. More recently, last summer, one of my neighbours was getting rid of some DVDs, which included the first two seasons of House. I took them home, and finally started watching them this past month.
I’ll admit that the show isn’t technically a detective show in the traditional sense. Its episodes revolve around a hospital where a doctor of diagnostic medicine and his team try to figure out what’s wrong with a new patient. However, given that neither the viewer nor the protagonists initially know what’s causing the patient’s symptoms, there is a mystery to finding a particular culprit — in this case a disease rather than a person.
The format of the show also reminds me a bit of Diagnosis: Murder, the 90s comedy/mystery starring Dick Van Dyke. Both of these shows feature multiple side-kicks, each of which has a different hypothesis regarding how to solve the case. Although, admittedly, House would normally not be described as a comedy.
Click here to stream House on Amazon Prime.
or Click here to purchase House on DVD.
Murder, She Watched 