No one likes a jerk. They’re difficult enough in real life, so it's a mystery as to why a network would create a show centered on a self-involved, unlikable mug whose only redeeming quality is his ability to solve crimes through his powers of observation.

That skill set would please pretty much any police department, but the personality that goes with them makes for annoying television, even on a Friday night.

That summarizes the great failing of USA's “Psych,” whose first-season finale aired last Friday night. It's hard to miss USA’s tagline, "Characters welcome” and the network has lived up to it with most of its original dramas. “Monk,” “The Dead Zone,” and “The 4400” all focus on people who are both blessed and cursed with special talents.

Whatever Shawn Spencer's (James Roday) fictional curse is meant to be, his real curse is his grating personality.

Spencer is a standard-issue slacker who also happens to have incredible powers of observation, honed relentlessly (some might say borderline abusively) by his cop father (Corbin Bernsen) when he was a boy.

For complicated but uninteresting reasons, Spencer ends up trying to help the Santa Barbara Police Department solve a crime. They don’t take him seriously, so he takes what seems to be the next logical step in his mind: He pretends to be a psychic. The trickery works, the case is solved, and a business (as well as a series) is born.

The premise strains credulity, yet it has promise. At the least, tagging after a fake psychic/real detective sounds like silly good fun. Besides, most good character-based detective shows aren’t really about solving the mystery as much as getting to know, and delighting in, the investigator. Peter Falk's Columbo was no Sherlock Holmes, but he was always entertaining. And so it was with James Garner in “The Rockford Files,” Angela Lansbury in “Murder, She Wrote” and Tom Selleck in “Magnum P.I.” They were likable, which made them great company for an hour.

It's the same for Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer” and Tony Shalhoub of USA’s other, far better detective series “Monk.” Both are flawed but endlessly entertaining crime-solvers. They make the ride worthwhile, even if the destination is sometimes obvious.

By contrast, Roday’s Spencer makes even a short journey painful. Good as he as at noticing clues, he's a dislikable sort, quick with the sarcastic quip, the condescending aside, and it gets old real quick. The perpetually cautious, long-suffering sidekick (Dule Hill) is more sympathetic than the series’ faux-rebellious hero.

But perhaps Spencer's biggest failing is that he doesn't relate. He sees crimes as puzzles he must crack. He gives off no empathy for or even passing interest in the crime victims. And because he can't relate, it's impossible to relate to him.

In the season finale, investigating the disappearance of a teenager, he gleefully jumps on the missing boy's bed as if he were at play, doing so in front of the boy's mother. It's off-putting, and if not cruel-seeming at least insensitive. It's the behavior of a person suffering from the worst sort of shallow self-involvement.

There's no hint of anything deeper at Shawn’s core. He’s just a really clever punk.

As he is, a character who is getting one over on others by pretending to be a psychic, Spencer must struggle to develop credibility before the camera, so the viewer is brought into the portrayal in a sympathetic way. Roday’s Spencer way overplays it. In several psychic scenes, in which he pretends to commune with spirits, he closes his eyes, bounces around and shouts a lot. That may be intended as funny, physical humor but the effect is over-the-top and unconvincing.

“Psych” is not beyond salvation. While it's certainly derivative of “Monk,” its lead-in, there's more than enough material to build from, and the pairing of the two would make for a strong two-hour block of character cop dramas, which is surely what USA had in mind.

But when the show comes back in January, Roday’s Spencer needs that smirk wiped off his face. He needs to relate to victims, and he needs to be mindful that as a conman, which he is, he's especially at risk of turning off those around him, including viewers. He must become both likeable and compassionate. He is now neither.