Things That Go Bump in the Night Don’t Even Budge on TV

From The New York Times, Television Section, Critics Notebook: Things That Go Bump in the Night Don’t Even Budge on TV
Criminals robbing convenience stores have not been able to escape them. Fathers taking a soccer ball to the groin à la “America’s Funniest Home Videos” have not been able to escape them. Couples having sex on a supposedly secluded beach have not been able to escape them. And yet ghosts and other paranormal entities so far have proved amazingly adept at avoiding the millions of security cameras, cellphone cameras and video cameras that now seem to record virtually every moment of life on earth.

That remarkable streak is continuing with “Paranormal Challenge,” which arrived in June on the Travel Channel; “Haunted Collector,” which turned up at about the same time on Syfy; and “Paranormal Witness,” which begins on Wednesday, also on Syfy. This is just a guess, but presumably the streak will also remain intact once “Long Island Medium” makes its debut on TLC this month.

Ghost-hunting reality series seem to be almost as ubiquitous as dog- and cat-related shows on the cable spectrum. (“The Haunted,” on Animal Planet, combined both genres — if your dog is barking at seemingly nothing, you have ghosts.) They’re inexpensive to make and have a built-in audience: i.e., people who have closet doors that squeak or houses that are drafty on a windy day.

Such shows are — brace yourself; this is probably the only time you will ever see these low-rent programs equated with great literature — the “Waiting for Godot” of television. The participants, and of course the viewers, wait and wait and wait for ghosts to arrive, but none ever do. Apparently those who watch this stuff don’t realize that if any of these shows ever did snag proof of a paranormal presence, the news wouldn’t be buried on a third-tier cable channel.

The series come in two varieties. One, which includes the long-running Syfy show “Ghost Hunters” and A&E’s “Paranormal State,” features experts trying to find evidence of psychic activity at supposedly haunted sites. They wield infrared cameras, supersensitive digital recorders and other gadgetry that generally looks as if it came from the markdown bin at a Radio Shack. And this stuff does always manage to capture something: a blip of light, an indecipherable noise.

“Hey, come weld this wing,” one “Ghost Hunters” expert says in a recent episode, giving his translation of a fragment of scratchy noise the team captured at the Pacific Aviation Museum at Pearl Harbor. And, doggone it, now that he has said that, it really does sound as if that were what the recorder captured, presumably the voice of some dead airman. Of course, without the expert’s prompt, the ghost might just as easily have been saying, “Hirschfeld can’t sing,” or “Expelled nose ring” or “Hphtd tshck whgrg.” So it goes in the ghost-hunting business.

“Paranormal Challenge,” on Fridays, tries to re-energize this played-out genre by improbably melding the ghost-hunting show with the reality competition show. Zak Bagans, working a spinoff of his more traditional “Ghost Adventures” series, here isn’t doing the actual ghost hunting; he’s presiding over a competition between two teams tasked with finding paranormal activity at a spooky location like the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky (where tuberculosis patients died).

Each team is given a bunch of electronic gadgets. Each goes off into the darkness. Each returns and presents its never-very-substantive findings to Mr. Bagans and his judges. (On one recent episode a team’s hopes were deflated considerably when a judge advised that a flash of light captured by its night-vision camera was probably just an insect.) And then the judges declare a winner, based on criteria that seem random, even by reality TV standards.

“Paranormal Witness,” a Syfy show beginning on Wednesday night, represents the other breed of psychic television. It doesn’t bother hunting for hard evidence; it simply uses first-person testimony and re-enactment to sell the idea that someone has had a psychic encounter.

The opening installment focuses on a Baltimore couple whose 5-year-old daughter developed a friendship with an invisible (and, it turns out, malevolent) something named Emily, and then turns to a Florida mother and daughter who claim to have seen a faceless apparition on a roadside. It is this show, as much as “Paranormal Challenge,” that feels as if it should end in front of a panel of judges. It would be a far more entertaining program if, say, Mia Farrow, Linda Blair and Sissy Spacek cast a “convinced me” or “was just making it up” vote at the end.

Fans of the endless hunt will argue that not much paranormal activity has been captured on security cameras and such because the haunted realm doesn’t translate well into the dimensions of reality. Hogwash. From the groundbreaking paranormal investigations done more than a half-century ago by Famous Studios on its “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons, we already know what a ghost looks like: white, cherubic, reminiscent of a floating sheet with eyes. Casper, are you out there? Show yourself, for Pete’s sake. Put these people out of their misery