Wednesday, June 14, 2006

More Free Advertising for Futile Efforts

According to the Hollywood Report (via Yahoo News), Court TV is producing yet another show about psychic crime-solvers.

The premise of this spellbinding but nonetheless familiar-looking series, "Haunting Evidence," is simple: If ordinary detectives in small-town (or even big-city) America can't solve a simple murder case, then maybe Court TV can.

"Haunting" takes years-old cold murder cases and puts a new team of experts on the scene: psychic profilers, paranormal investigators and psychic mediums.

Together they solve cases that regular folk have not been able to up to this point.

It will be interesting to see how they spin the total lack of progress on these cases from psychic sources into some kind of endorsement of psychic investigators. Historically, psychics have never contributed any substantive evidence to any criminal case, despite their numerous claims (see the Wikipedia article on psychic detectives). I mean, look at their track record...

  • PsiTech reported that kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart had been killed, only to have her later found alive.
  • Psychics have been completely useless in the search for Natalee Holloway.
  • When 12 miners were inaccurately reported to have survived a West Virginia coal mine accident in January, Sylvia Browne promptly confirmed the report during a live radio interview. Unfortunately, the report was backwards; twelve miners had died.
  • Psychics couldn’t even find the lost show dog Fifi, who escaped her travel cage after the AKC Dog Show.
Psychic crime-solvers are an amusing bit of modern fantasy that the TV-viewing public takes way too seriously. In real life, they are utterly useless. This show will just be free publicity for people who are, at best, deluded or, at worst, con artists.

1 comment:

Thursday said...

On the plus side (hopefully), there is a fictional show coming out about the same subject - called "Psych". Alas, it's only on the USA Network as of yet, but it would be nice to see it get a little more audience.

Bigger networks are probably afraid of losing the woo demographic, though.