BOY DETECTIVE.

Now, more than ever, Friday night is behavior-disorder night on the USA Network. For the past four years, there's been "Monk," whose main character, Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub), is a brilliant detective who has been on leave from the San Francisco police force since his wife was murdered and some of his tics and habits and eccentricities flowered into a full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder. And, starting this Friday (after the premiere of the new season of "Monk"), we have "Psych," a show about the wacky crime-solving adventures and personal misadventures of Shawn Spencer (James Roday), a Santa Barbara policeman's son who is immature, distractable, and impulsive, and who, though he's only in his late twenties, has had--and lost--fifty-seven jobs since he graduated from high school. O.C.D. and A.D.D.: there's a good reason that USA's branding motto is "Characters welcome." (The madness continues on Sunday nights, with back-to-back paranormality: "The 4400," about a group of forty-four hundred people who were abducted from Earth over the course of years and are one day returned here, en masse, and "The Dead Zone," in which Anthony Michael Hall comes out of a six-year coma with the gift of second sight.)

"Psych" is, in a sense, Son of "Monk"; both shows revolve around characters whose past rules tyrannically over their present and both try to squeeze comedy from their situations. "Monk," which, in addition to Shalhoub, has a wonderful supporting cast, is often very touching, whereas "Psych" is, for the most part, merely jokey. Shawn's father, Henry (Corbin Bernsen), now retired from the force, groomed him for detective work from early childhood. In the third episode, we see a flashback of Shawn when he was seven, playing detective by himself, pretending to shadow a perp. His father, watching him, criticizes his technique. The dispirited Shawn says, "I was just playing." Henry, exasperated, shoots back, "Well, play right, Shawn. Or don't play at all." That kind of attitude will put a damper on a person's development; in Shawn's case, this means that later in life when his friend Gus (Dule Hill), a responsible pharmaceutical salesman, teases him about having had so many jobs, he says, "Yes, I have, and they were all fun." Shawn plays all the time--but, wouldn't you know it, he also turns out to be an absolute ace at detective work. Take that, Dad.

In the opening scene of the series, while the two are at a diner, Henry quizzes young Shawn on the details of their surroundings--how many people are wearing hats, which letter in the exit light is burned out, and so on. The waitress suggests that he'll be a detective when he grows up. "I'm never going to grow up," he says. In the next scene--twenty years later--he's making out with a waitress on his couch with the TV on, and solves a crime just by watching the story on the local news and noticing details in the picture. He immediately calls the police to ...