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Best Supernatural TV Shows?
I’ve been watching more television than usual lately. A lot of people like to boo and hiss when it comes to tv, but I don’t mind it now and then. Usually, I find that it cuts into time that I want to do other things in. But sometimes it’s a totally welcome change of pace. Anyway, Ran’s comments at the end of my recent interview with him got me thinking this would be a good topic of conversation.
We could feasibly talk about all tv, but since we’re at Pop Occulture, let’s restrict it to television shows that have some element of the supernatural in them. What do you think are the best or at least your favorites, either currently or in the past?
X-Files is for me going to be way up in the list. But I wouldn’t say it’s my all-time favorite. I might actually give that honor to Quantum Leap (or the Simpsons, but we’re trying to stay supernatural here). I’m sure there are other shows that really impacted me growing up, but those ones were really tremendously important and molded my character even.
Currently, I’ll admit to watching a lot of Smallville. I never liked Superman really until that show, although the seasons have their high-points and low points when it comes to writing and character development. I used to think their Lex Luthor character was just awesome, but now he’s getting a little too over the top and predictable for me. Still a good time, even though I hate when shows use actors obviously in their 20’s or 30’s and try to have you believe they’re still in highschool. What a pain.
Since we’re on the WB, I also watched the first two episodes of that other show with Jensen Ackles they just started called Supernatural, which is about a pair of brothers who investigate the supernatural, hunting down ghosts and monsters to solve some kind of running family mystery. I mean, it’s not an amazing show, but I like it so far. You know what I saw the end of last week that sucked though was that Ghost Whisperer crap with Jennifer Love Hewitt. Total cheese-fest. And what a stupid title! And what happened to her? She used to be cute…
Anyway, those are just off the top of my head. I don’t get cable or anything, so don’t make fun of me for being a network whore.
September 27th, 2005 at 1:02 am
when i was a kid in england there was this show called wanjina magic. it was about the ghosts of the forest in the austrailian outback and it used to scare the fucking shit out of me. the memory of it gives me goosebumps just writing about it. i don`t remember much about the details other than how it made me feel. i think i watched it from behind the couch.
September 27th, 2005 at 1:20 am
Oh man, if we’re gonna talk about that, you just reminded me of how much Unsolved Mysteries used to freak me out. Even just hearing that guy’s voice or the music gave me the willies sometimes.
I also used to watch a TON of old re-runs of In Search Of… with Leonard Nimoy. Not usually as scary, except for once in a while.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:58 am
JK was telling me about Max Headroom, anyone else seen that?
What about Alien Nation - was that any good?
This isn’t paranormal, but for some reason I could sit around
and watch COPS all day. Does anyone else feel strangely attracted
to that show?
September 27th, 2005 at 3:24 am
I can’t afford cable so it’s broadcast tv for me too. I’ve been watching The Outer limits and Stargate SG-1 on fox late Sunday nights for quite a while now. Seems like the schedule just changed, and now Stargate Atlantis is on, I think it replaced The Outer limits, which would suck. I think a little tv is ok, but it’s easy to watch too much. I heard that brain activity is lower while watching tv than when sleeping, that can’t be true, can it?
September 27th, 2005 at 7:16 am
because of the small amount of information t.v. beams to your brain, 450 lines, the brain goes from an alert state to a deep trance state in a short period of time. t.v. literally induces a hypnotic trance. cool eh? flip channels during commercials from now on.
September 27th, 2005 at 9:30 am
I loved the original Twilight Zone and also the short-lived 80’s version that was on when I was super super small. There was an episode of that where this kid found out that his grandmother, who was about to die, was really a devil worshipper and she’d opened a portal to hell beneath her floor which, surprisingly enough to the kid, felt cold, not hot (that surprised me a lot, too, when I saw it. “Isn’t hell supposed to be hot?”). At the end of the episode she had died but possessed his body or something and his eyes glowed red!
Just the intro to Tales from the Darkside used to scare the shit out of me, though I never really watched it. The intro was enough to give me nightmares.
There was a show on Fox in it’s earliest days called Werewolf which I thought totally kicked ass and I watched it every week religiously. It was sort of like the Incredible Hulk (which I also loved) because the main guy was forced to be a drifter and a loner by his affliction, but he was always on the hunt to find the guy who had turned him into a werewolf so he could kill him and thus be rid of the wolf-curse. The main bad guy’s name was Scorzini or something and he looked like Jack Palance and had an eye-patch and was totally evil. This show ruled. I don’t know if anyone else remembers it. It lasted about three and a half seasons.
Doctor Who–especially Tom Baker.
Friday the 13th the Series. It was syndicated and had nothing to do with the movies, but was a great, great show. These people were in search of all of these demonically posessed knick-knacks which had been stolen or confiscated after some occult antique salesman died. I thought the writing was great. THere were episodes with ghosts, with vampires, with Satanists. and it was very, very adult-seeming. It was put on back-to-back in Chicago with the Nightmare on Elm Street series for awhile.
The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo!
X-Files. It was a really great show for a really long time, but ultimately I’m ambivalent about it since it sort of was used to innoculate mass-media against conspiracy theory (aka investigative journalism and true as opposed to pick-and-choose political and media skepticism).
I loved Millenium. For many many reasons. I was really disappointed when Chris Carter pretty much abandoned the show and it degenerated into a second-rate X-files after the season finale of the 2nd season. But I should have known the show wouldn’t make it up to the 2000 season.
Sightings. If I saw it now, I would probably laugh at it, but it was cool because it was the first thing like that on a network (even if it was Fox) since Nimoy did “In Search of”.
I like the Smallville I’ve seen. And I liked the few episodes I saw of that psychic show with beautiful, beautiful Patricia Arquette, though I don’t know what it’s called or even if it’s still on.
Oh, V! That show was huge.
September 27th, 2005 at 9:46 am
I enjoyed “Dead Like Me” immensely. Too bad it was cancelled.
September 27th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
there’s a couple of new ones that are really cool. the best, imho, is ‘ghost hunters‘ on sci-fi. it’s a ‘reality’ show about some guys who are plumbers by day and parapsychologists by nite. it maintains a fantastic balance of scepticism vs. honest inquiry. it’s cool, funny and creepy all at once.
as to x-files-like thingies, the new show ‘threshold‘ has promise. it’s about a team of ‘contingency’ experts, being forced against their will to investigate first contact with ultraterrestrials who use four-dimensional technology and fractal patterns to communicate. only been a few episodes, but the premiere was absolutely chilling & full of awesome speculation about four-dimensional entites, government cover-ups, etc. excellent stuff! it’s on cbs on fridays . . . .
September 27th, 2005 at 12:28 pm
Mark Frost & David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is one of my all-time favourites, as my friend and I are currently rewatching the series on DVD. Millennium was also one of my favourites till Fox began to fuddle with Chris Carter due to a lack of American viewer interest (from what I understand).
Max Headroom did, indeed, paint a bleak and twisted cyberpunk future. Very ahead of its time for when it was on-air. The Outer Limits, for a low-budget episodic show does a quite decent job at times portraying analogies to certain philosophical questions; I’ve always enjoyed it.
Can’t say I’ve ever seen Smallville. I know there is a slough of other bad paranormal oriented shows out there, but I can’t say any jumpt to mind as anything I’ve ever enjoyed. Teletubbies?
September 27th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
hebrides, I remember that episode of Twilight Zone. What freaked me out about it was the fact that the kid in that episode was played by Barret Oliver from The Neverending Story and D.A.R.Y.L., both great (and surprisingly mature, in retrospect) kids movies that I watched constantly when I was little.
Speaking of the WB, my favorite tv show of all time is “Felicity” (created by JJ Abrams, who went on to create “Lost”; I’m continually rooting for JJ Abrams to become universally respected just so when I say “Felicity” is my favorite show it doesn’t sound so absurd). When the fourth and final season of “Felicity” ended, the main character ended up with the guy she had been chasing after when the series started, Ben, and it was a decently happy ending (the running conflict of the series is whether Felicity will end up with Ben, the dim-witted pretty-boy high school crush with a heart of gold, or Noel, the more mature and stable nerd who isn’t quite as handsome). But after that, they tacked on six extra episodes, where Felicity finds out that Ben was the wrong choice and ends up going back in time (via witchcraft) to somewhere in season 3, I think, to pursue Noel.
I thought that premise was great, but I actually didn’t watch the extra episodes. I’m a “Felicity” purist — no retcons for me.
September 27th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
I think it’s on NBC, but there’s a show called Medium starring Patricia Arquette, that’s supposedly based on real-life medium Allison DuBois. In the show she has a lot of similar issues that I remember Sylvia Brown talking about; having ghosts visit her at all times of the day and asking her for help– that kind of thing. And then of course Allison goes and tells the police and they solve crimes together. It’s actually a rather good show in my opinion, regardless of how much of it is true or just for effect. I mean, come on, we all loved the giant parasite man on the X-files that lived in port-o-potties. `Scared the crap out of me.
To silverspringwoman: I LOVE(D) Dead Like Me. I own both seasons on dvd because it’s just so likeable. It’s fun to play with the concept of reapers living amongst us, too. I’m just really sad that they cancelled it and shows like Fat Actress have managed to do better.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
I really liked HBO’s Carnivale, deliciously apocalyptic, the final battle between good and evil set in the Depression. Dead Like Me, reminds me of the discussion we were having about psychopomps on here last week. Oh yeah someone else told me Firefly was a good show.
September 27th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
“Night Stalker” with Darren McGavin, baby. They’re bringing it back, I think, with someone else in the lead role.
And of course anything by Rod Serling. That includes “Night Gallery” and the ending to “Planet of the Apes”…
September 27th, 2005 at 8:31 pm
How could you forget Carnivale?!? When they canceled it, I canceled my television. (not that I’m sorry)
And of course a vote for sightings, where I first met my husband (although I didn’t know it yet.) Dead like me definitely ruled, sorry to see it go.
September 27th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
I’ve never seen Carnivale…. heard only good things though.
September 27th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
I think you could appreciate it. Not only is it absolute eye candy, it’s period perfect, and it’s perfectly spooky, very gnostic, and very subtle. No rubber monsters..you’ll be guessing for a long time.
On the downside, it’s been canceled, so we’ll never know how it ends.
(but don’t let that stop you)
September 27th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
Ooh yes, I wanted to see this!
September 28th, 2005 at 12:07 am
Three words: Highway to Heaven
I wonder what it would be like to go back with what we know now and watch that one.
Garrett: My humble approximation is that Max Headroom was more dystopian sci-fi. I suppose anymore we could call that “supernatural”. I do remember this episode though, where this company was buying people’s dreams from them and then selling them back wholesale. Probably ripped off from PKD. And who knows, probably falls under the “rubric” of supernaturalism too. Who knows?
But that show (Max Headroom) would also be rad to go back and see what jumps out at us here in 2005.
September 28th, 2005 at 12:13 am
Holy crap! I haven’t thought about Highway to Heaven in over a decade. Man, that was really just the religious version of Quantum Leap, wasn’t it? I used to watch that shit with my family as a kid.
September 28th, 2005 at 10:00 am
That episode of Max Headroom you’re talking about, JK, was the best one I ever saw. I still think about that one from time to time! As I remember, too, the people selling off their dreams were like junkies and some of them ended up dying from selling off too many of their dreams. The only other episode that matches that is the original british pilot where there were all those people spontaneously combusting upon watching a certain channel or tv show.
It ain’t a TV show or anything, but has anyone ever sat down and conquered the book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace? There’s a lot of interesting shit–ghosts, a David Lynch-like genius father, intelligence agencies and corporately funded years (The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar), a naked yogi-Shaman named Lyle who lives in the high school weight room and seems to live off the sweat of the kids working out…For some reason I just thought about this book.
September 28th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
BUFFY RULZZ!!
How’s that for lowering the standards ’round these here parts?
September 29th, 2005 at 8:04 am
I mostly read books rather than watch TV (still do), but one show I always watched was Northern Exposure. I loved that show. It was more about the bizarre than about the supernatural, but it had enough of the latter as well.
Out of all the crazy stuff that happened on that show, my favorite is when Fleischman goes on his quest to find the “Jeweled City of the North.” That’s one of the best plot lines I’ve ever come across. Great stuff on that show.