Psych in Real Life

Posted by Adrienne on March 7, 2010 under TV & Movies | Be the First to Comment

Have you ever visited the places where a favorite movie or TV show of yours was shot? It can be a lot of fun to see what a place that you’ve only seen on TV looks like in real life. A lot of TV shows are being filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia nowadays, which makes it easy for us to see some of these show locations, since Vancouver is only a few hours away from Seattle.

One of our favorite shows currently on TV is Psych, a cop “dramedy.” It’s on USA network on Wednesday nights if you want to check it out. While the show is set in Santa Barbara, CA, the filming is done in Vancouver, and one of the main outdoor shoot locations is in the town of White Rock, just across the US-Canadian border. On our way to visit Vancouver for the day, we stopped off in White Rock to see where the shooting happens.

One of the reasons that we like the show so much is that it’s really funny. The premise is this: Shawn Spencer has a talent for observing things and then making deductions based on what he sees. He’s so good at this that he’s able to convince many people that he actually has psychic abilites. With the help of his best friend Burton “Gus” Guster, Shawn uses his talent to help the Santa Barbara police department solve cases. Shawn and Gus’s wisecracking and unorthodox methods annoy Detective Carleton Lassiter, the SBPD’s head detective, but they always find the bad guy in the end, generally in a hilarious manner. Rounding out the cast are Detective Lasseter’s junior partner, Detective Juliet O’Hara, who has so far resisted Shawn’s charms, and Shawn’s dad, Henry, a retired police officer. The show’s writers are extremely creative; plots have included parodies of horror films, Spanish telenovelas, and Bollywood films, along with lots of great one-liners. The mysteries themselves are not easy to solve, and plenty of episodes have red herrings in them to heighten the entertainment.

So, what did we see in White Rock? Shawn and Gus have their own detective agency called “Psych” - they work on a freelance basis for the SBPD – and the exterior of the Psych Office is, in real life, the White Rock Museum and Archives. In the show, it looks like this:

(That’s Shawn, played by James Roday, on the left, and Gus, played by Dule Hill on the right)

Here’s our picture of the Museum:

It’s not quite exactly like what you see on the show, but it was pretty cool for us to see. Out in front of the Museum is the White Rock waterfront. Some parts of the show are shot there too. Like in this picture:

(Shawn and Gus are on the left and are joined by Detective Lassiter played by Tim Omundson on the bench)

On our visit, we walked right along there! Underneath the benches, you can see some small dark plaques – they have the names of people who sponsored the White Rock Museum on them, and are shaped like little locomotives, because the museum used to be the White Rock railroad terminal. Here’s what we saw when we were there:

The rock in the foreground, at the base of the tree, is the same one that’s right behind Detective Lassiter’s bench in the top picture. Sweet!

Shawn and Gus drive around town a lot on the show, in Gus’s little blue Toyota (a not very initmidating car, but that’s part of the comedy). It looks like this:

(This was the best picture I could find online – trust me, that car is tiny!)

In a funny coincidence, our car that we drove to Vancouver is a blue Toyota Yaris, and it looks a lot like Gus’s car on the show. So we had to have picture of our car with the real life Psych office. Here it is:

It was a lot of fun to see on of the places where they shoot one of our favorite shows. Now, we’ll remember what a great time we had whenever we watch an episode of Psych. And White Rock is a fun place to visit too. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by!

All photographs of Psych cast members were downloaded from the official USA Network website (here) All White Rock in Real Life photos were taken by us.

Thanks, USA Network! Please don’t sue!