Dexter Meet Shawn

On the surface Psych and Dexter seem like unlikely companions. Could the outgoing, life-loving Shawn Spencer and the coldly logical Dexter Morgan have anything in common? On any other day perhaps not, but if you like me spent the weekend watching the boys side by side you might agree.

I was introduced to Dexter, that most morally ambiguous serial killer, for the first time this weekend and immediately fell for him and his dark horror/noir confection of a show. It is remarkably well crafted and Michael C. Hall is eerily convincing and appealing in this unusual role. So far (I’m six episodes into season one) I love everything about the show from the unexpectedly jaunty music to the dark Miami setting to the character’s constant eating. It’s a strange and disorienting world that’s almost compulsively watchable. However, I had to take a break sometime. It just so happened that I filled that break by watching the season finale of Psych.

I’ve loved Psych since it debuted two years ago on USA. It’s a light, funny show peppered with obscure 80’s references and random pineapple sightings. It’s at once silly and fully aware of its silliness, merrily lampooning those serious procedurals and psychic cop dramas in one fell swoop. At its center is James Roday as the hyper-observant faux psychic Shawn. Roday mugs and jumps and still manages to give one the most purely comedic performances on television. The show is in short a joy to watch.

So you can imagine my surprise when in a weekend television haze I began to think the two shows had something in common besides being led by two handsome blond men.
In my fevered state it seemed to me that the shows were shadow twins. What is Dexter but a fun-house reflection of Shawn? Stay with me here.

From what I’ve gathered from the series, Dexter is a product of his adoptive father’s molding. Harry saw a dark impulse for killing in Dexter and nurtured that impulse, directing it towards small animals and later “bad” people. He turns Dexter into a sort of vigilante and it seems sets his son up to carry out the impulses he himself as a cop must keep in check. Did Harry really “save” his son as Dexter believes or did he simply hone him into a finely tuned killer? Either way Harry shaped Dexter, never allowing him to find his own path, never giving him any other choice but killing. And Dexter followed that path.

Then there’s Shawn. From a young age Shawn’s cop father Henry honed his son’s observational skills. Everything was a challenge (how many hats in the restaurant, how many towels on the beach) and he tried to keep Shawn grounded, stomping out imaginary notions. In this case Shawn rebelled from his father, using those childhood lessons not to become a cop but to become a “psychic” detective marrying the imaginary and the irreverent in a way that drives his father crazy. Both boys are a product of their father’s molding, Dexter embraces that mold while Shawn took the mold, smashed it and did a little Irish jig on it.

Their very characters are similar. Shawn and Dexter are always performing. Dexter pretends to be normal; he brings donuts to his coworkers and picks up his girlfriend’s kids from school all the while hiding this dark life he leads. Shawn revels in his showmanship, every day is a performance for him. He leaps on desks and throws out fake names leveling every person in his path with his sheer charisma, but we know that this isn’t Shawn. Shawn doesn’t like to be vulnerable, he doesn’t like to be serious so he created a persona that allows him to hide.

And on the superficial side, are there two shows on television any more enamored with the art of eating than these two? The characters are constantly eating or talking about eating, particularly Shawn and Dexter who both approach the act with a strange sort of reverance whether that be Dexter’s ode to the pleasure of eating while driving or Shawn’s joy in preparing the perfect pineapple upside down cake.

Then there’s the whole death thing. The character’s are constantly dealing with death (although Dexter is alone here in inflicting it), but both men approach it in a deeply detached fashion. They don’t grieve over these deaths, in fact they often joke about it. A corpse is a corpse as far as these men are concerned. For each of them a dead body is a source of joy---for Shawn it means a new case to solve and for Dexter it’s either a mystery to unravel or the end result of his favorite pastime.

Finally, to round out the mirror analogy they’re located on opposite sides of the country---Shawn in sunny San Diego and Dexter in well, sunny Miami. So the next time you settle in for a fun, silly night of Psych think about his dark brother the equally charming Dexter and play the what if game. What if it was Shawn merrily killing killers? What if Dexter palled around with Gus solving murders with his hyper-observancy? Is it really such a stretch?