Corbin Bernsen

Corbin Bernsen's face does something a beat before his characters lie. The smile comes first, wide and sunlit, and then the eyes catch up and decide how much of it to mean. He built a career on that gap. Arnie Becker, the divorce lawyer he played on L.A. Law from 1986 to 1994, was a man you would not trust with your marriage or your wallet, and audiences liked him anyway, because Bernsen let them see the small panic underneath the tan. He said of the part that "the guy is a rat, but you don't want the audiences to not like him", and that sentence describes his trade better than most critics have managed.

The career runs in phases. Small film parts and the soap Ryan's Hope came first, then L.A. Law made him, and for eight years he was the suited, opportunistic charmer of American television. The films that followed used the same equipment at different volumes: the vain ballplayer Roger Dorn in Major League (1989) and its sequels, the villainous Dr Alan Feinstone in The Dentist (1996), the polished Harlan Dexter in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). Then television took him back for the long haul as Henry Spencer, the retired cop and exasperated father on Psych (2006 to 2014), eight seasons opposite James Roday. He has kept working in guest and recurring parts since, and directs and produces independent projects of his own.

What he does well is make an unpleasant man bearable, and occasionally worth rooting for, without pretending he is nice. The instrument is comic timing more than depth: a pause, a shrug, a line thrown away so that the character's vanity does the work. On Psych the same skill turned paternal, the straight man to Roday's nonsense, and critics who followed the show noticed how much of its warmth came from him. What he does less well is choose. The years after L.A. Law are strewn with television films and a third Major League that nobody needed, and the pretty-boy image of the suit years meant he was rarely offered the parts that might have shown what else was there.

We have reviewed only Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and honestly, we spent it watching Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer spar and forgot Bernsen was in the film until the plot required him. That is partly how Shane Black's script treats its rich men, as furniture, and partly the fate of an actor whose best work was done in weekly instalments, where the charm had time to curdle and recover. If you want to see what he can do, the eight years of Becker are the case, and Psych is the pleasanter afternoon. The films are where he went between them.