TV Week TV Week

By Jacqueline Cutler © Zap2it

After waiting years, the “Psychos” are victorious!

Die-hard fans of USA Network’s “Psych” finally get to see “Psych: The Musical” on Sunday, Dec. 15.

For those who know Dule Hill only from “The West Wing,” he’s a smooth tap-dancer now starring on Broadway in “After Midnight.” He, James Roday, Timothy Omundson (who has a particularly rich baritone) and the rest of the cast also prove they can sing in the two-hour special.

“After Season 5, we were at Comic-Con, and (series creator Steve Franks) put it out there to fans: ‘Do you want a musical?’ And everyone screamed,” Roday says. “He could have said, ‘Do you want a show where we all sit in a circle and break wind?’ And they would have reacted in the same way.”

Franks recalls he toyed with the idea of creating a musical episode since the beginning.

“We had started on the pilot, talking about doing a musical, and it was just a weird, off-in-thedistance idea,” Franks says. “We talked about it because after the last shot of the pilot, James and Dule had done a lot of singing and performed Michael Jackson’s ‘Man in the Mirror.’ ”

In the special, Shawn and Gus (Roday and Hill) track down crazed playwright Z (guest star Anthony Rapp, “Rent”). Z is accused of acting out every scorned playwright’s fantasy — OK, maybe only the most delusional scorned playwrights — of burning a theater to the ground with a critic inside.

Z was institutionalized in a hospital for the criminally insane, where he had, conveniently, confided in Mr. Yang (Ally Sheedy).

As usual, “Psych” does not take itself too seriously, and the musical does not require knowing the series’ back stories.

“I designed everything I wrote in this episode, every character in a song or dialogue, every character is introduced as if this is the first time,” Franks says. “If you never watched an episode of ‘Psych,’ this is the perfect one to get introduced.”

Franks doesn’t miss a beat and acknowledges that hardcore Psychos, as fans of the seventh-season show refer to themselves, will find incongruities.

“You could make a drinking game, some sort of inaccuracy within the storyline,” Franks says. “There are a whole bunch of little things, Lassie (Omundson) not wearing a wedding ring. ‘Psych’ followers, Psychos, will pick up on inaccuracies, because I was working on some of this before some of that happened.”

“I think it does tie up, it certainly wraps up the Yang story,” Franks says.