Southern California native, Steve Franks, Creator of Psych, earned a BA in English from the University of California, Irvine in 1991 while also doing stand-up comedy and fronting the popular Orange County band, Friendly Indians. While a graduate student in the film department of Loyola Marymount University, Franks career was launched when his first screenplay, "Big Daddy" was purchased by Columbia Pictures as a vehicle for Adam Sandler, and went on to gross more than $160 million domestically. On the heels of this success, Franks went on to create and work on more than a dozen other feature film projects, including the action/comedy "Skiptracer" for producer Neal Moritz and Sony Pictures, and the feature version of "I Dream of Jeannie."

Franks has been involved in television with  numerous projects for ABC, CBS and NBC networks. A fan for many years of classic, light detective shows like "Moonlighting" and "Magnum P.I.," Franks created a character who shares a similar tone -- a psychic detective who has no psychic abilities ... and "Psych" was born. Steve recently answered questions about what we can expect from the season finale, and when the show comes back from hiatus.

Question> What advice would you give to aspiring writers in the business?

Steve>  For me, my advice is to write and to keep writing if you want to be a writer because if you want to be an actor writing doesn’t really help you that much.  For me, I was working at Disneyland and working in college and I wrote five scripts before I ever went out with one because the first three were terrible and then the fourth one was less terrible.  The fifth one I thought was pretty good.  The fifth one I set up and sold.  For me, I didn’t know anybody in the business.  I didn’t have any relatives in the business.  I just knew I always wanted to do it.  I knew from the time I was in fifth grade.  I was writing scripts in fifth grade, so I just knew that I was going to be in it for the long haul and I had to just keep working at it.  For me it was trial and error, trial and error, and trial and error.  The interesting thing about being a writer is so many of my friends were like, “Yes, I want to write.  That’s cool.”  I always encourage them to keep writing and you find out who really wants to be a writer by who’s still around two years later. 

Question> What can you tell us about the fall finale and where we’re going when the show comes back?

Steve>  The fall finale is really, really fun and really intense.  The idea came about after we had the Mr. Yang episode that ended last year.  We thought how fun was it to really have a fun, suspenseful, intense episode.  Bonnie Hammer, the head of pretty much half of the world and our NBC/USA world really loved that episode and wanted to see us do something like that, so we decided, “You know what?  Let’s do something great and exciting.”  We actually shot this episode third and when we got it back we were like, “Wow!  This is really intense and is really big and really has this unbelievable finale. It has so many things.  This is clearly not the light season kickoff.  It’s like this is a season finale,” so we actually shot this episode months and months ago and we realized we’ve already done our season finale, so we went on to the lighter, funnier, goofier stuff that you’ve been seeing in the last few weeks.

 It’s really exciting and we like to do one or two of these every half season where we do something that’s a little more intense and more exciting.  In the spring we’re doing another one or in the winter.  I guess it would be officially called the winter.  I call it the spring even though we don’t have a date yet for next year, but for us it’s always about building off of the core and what we can get away with in Psych.  Since we were able to get away with something more intense with ... we sort of pushed it a little bit more in this episode with all of the signature fun comedy that we also get throughout this episode.  Expect this to be probably our most intense episode, a lot of fun, a slam-bang finale and we’ll follow that up in the spring with something equally as crazy. 

Question> Can you give us any kind of hints as to what we’ll see in the second half of the season?

Steve>  Oh, my gosh.  Of course I can.  We’re actually shooting it right now.  I finally realize my dream to do a Jaws episode, so we’re doing an episode with a shark attack.  We’re doing an Outbreak episode.  We’ve always wanted to do something fun with that.  Of course, what’s more fun than a deadly virus on the loose?   What are we doing?  In the spring, I call it, the winter, we’re starting off doing a military episode and we’ve landed our dream guest star.  That’s John Cena from the World Wrestling.  We’ve been trying to do that since season one.  We actually had a wrestling idea.  We’re really excited.  For me it’s always been each episode is a little movie, a little summer movie and we’re continuing that.  Each episode probably couldn’t be more different than the last one and that’s the way we like it until we run out of worlds. 

Question> Your band, The Friendly Indians, recorded the theme song for the show, but it is not available on iTunes, while other Friendly Indians tracks are?  Can you tell us why that is?

Steve>  What happened is we played around.  The Friendly Indians have been around for ten years.  By the way, The Friendly Indians are back and rehearsing and we’re going to do some shows in the off season, but it was one of those things where we went in to record the theme song before and we got this great studio where Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder had recorded.  We had great producers. It was really super professional and cool.  We only had enough studio time to record the one-minute version of the song, so we were like, “Okay.  We’ll come back and record the full-length version,” and there just has not been any time to go back and do it.  Now that we have this really great version of the one-minute song we can’t sort of half-way do it.  We have to go lock into a studio and get all of those elements back together. 

 The reason it’s not available is there is no full-length version of it.  We fully intend, every off season, to do that, but as I mentioned earlier, at the end of every season I usually curl up into a ball and sleep for the two months we have off until we start writing again.  So, I hear you.  I’m going to pull the guys together now that we’re back rehearsing.  I think it’s inevitable that we’ll actually do a great recording of it and get it on iTunes.  Actually, we’re hoping we’re going to have enough material to go in and record a third album.

Question> The Mentalist; is so similar to Psych just on a more serious level.  What was your initial reaction to that? 

Steve>  Well, I think we can both probably comment on that.  For me, I guess it’s the sincerest form of flattery, you know.  There’s not really anything you can do about it, but we like to take every opportunity we can to sort of play with it and have fun with it.  There will be a Mentalist reference in this Friday’s episode and probably a lot more in the winter season. 

Question> What were you doing or what inspired you when you came up with the premise of Psych?

Steve>  At the very core of it I just found TV depressing, especially the procedural.  I grew up with what they called the light hours, the shows that were fun:  Magnum PI.  When I was really little it was Rockford Files and Moonlighting and all of those shows that were just fun to watch.  I found myself looking at TV and it was always about murder and dismemberment and looking under a microscope at bones and flesh wounds.  For me, and I think this is also to go back to the very first question, the best advice I could give is I wrote the show for me.  I wrote a show that I wanted to see.  I’d never done a one-hour show.  I’d had a few half-hour, multi-camera live pilots, but I’d never even attempted to write the hour-long drama or cop show.  My dad was a cop, so I’m like, “Maybe now is the time to do a cop show.”  I wanted to do something that was fun and funny and revolved around characters that also can take you into a little mystery each week, but that you really got yourself wrapped up and loved the characters and to create a really fun world each week that does something that you don’t see on other shows. 

 I’m locked in that nobody else is doing a murdered sea lion episode and nobody else is doing an acapella group gets involved in a drug sting.  I feel really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I basically wrote the show that I’ve always wanted to see or that I missed from my childhood. 

Question> In casting Psych what was the one thing that James and Dule did that made you realize they were your Shawn and Gus?

Steve>  We looked at so many people for Shawn.  We cast Shawn first.  James came in and it was funny when James came in.  James is really funny because he grows a beard in the off season.  He’s really shy and really quiet.  This guy came in all really super quiet with this kind of thickish beard.  We’re like, “Who is this guy?”  Then he starts talking and it was like, “Oh, my gosh.  That might be him.”   Then James came in a second time.  We had a certain number of people we called back and James came in the second time and it was like, “Oh, my God.  That is him.” 

 James is such a good guy that he came in when we were bringing in all of the Guses.  I don’t know a ton about this business because, like I said, this is the first TV show I’ve done, but I don’t think that the lead of a show ever does that.  He was there for casting for all of the Guses and would read with every single person who came in to read for the part.  Dule came in for a meeting and it was like, “Wow.  This is kind of exactly what we were looking for.”  They had like an instant chemistry.  They were kind of friends right from the start. 

The only thing I knew going into the show is that you hear horror stories about actors who are difficult and stay in their trailer all day or won’t come out until the other actor comes out.  The only thing I knew coming in was I wanted everybody on our set to be there, to really want to be there and to be cool.  We have a no a-hole policy on our show.  James and Dule were really good people right from the start.  I liked them and I said, “You know what?  I can spend five to eight years hanging out with these guys.”  So the chemistry was first and foremost before those guys ever read a word together; in fact, the first time Dule came in it was just for a meeting at the end of the day.  We ended up just running the scenes right then and it was great.  There is a whole casting process where you have to bring the people into the network to read; well, we sort of tipped the scales a little bit.  We had Dule and James read together at Dule’s house.  James drove to Dule’s house and they sort of were more practiced than the others.  It was just great from the start.  Those guys were friends from the start. 

It was just really lucky.  I can’t stress enough how much of a miracle it is that a TV show ever gets made, ever becomes good, ever stays good and ever stays fresh.  All of those things happening and for us to be coming here to the end of our fourth season, we’ve been incredibly lucky and we’ve had so much fun along the way.  The fact that we went to Comic-Con this year and we filled a room with 4,200 seats and the fans were insanely great and for us to have that kind of following this far in it’s been magical and great.  We just feel so fortunate and lucky to be part of it. 

Tune in to  Psych Fridays at 10:00/9:00 central on USA Network.