As I’ve said before, I watch a lot of TV and most it is sci-fi or fantasy oriented in some way. Why? Because if I want something realistic I live in a city where a colleague had two of her students witness gun violence over the weekend. I don’t need to pretend stuff like that happens when it actually does. Anyway, I had noticed a few years back, about when Castle began, that there was a new formula for “hit-show”. Police officer + some atypical profession that helps solve crimes. I see this as starting with Bones in 2005 and continuing into the present.
However, it wasn’t until last year when my friend mentioned how she had a hard time watching police procedurals that it hit me, a new version of that formula had come into being. The Paranormal Police Procedural (PPP). The formula now being police officer + person with magical/special ability. Like regular police procedurals there is a certain amount of boredom that comes from their formula. To combat this though, unlike regular police procedurals that often have to fall back on romance (or lawyering) to fill in the gaps, paranormal police procedurals can fill in those gaps by providing background on the paranormal half of their show. There of course are romances anyways but they don’t have to share the weight of the story in the same way.
I’ve wanted to write about them as a sub-genre for a while but couldn’t figure out a good way to do them. So I’m going to follow up on this blog with a more detailed explorations of some PPPs but here are some preliminary thoughts the genre.
Of the four main PPPs (Sleepy Hollow, Grimm, Lucifer, and iZombie), each of these uses a different paranormal pretense for the show though they can be grouped into a number of tuples such as based on folk tales, based on comics, related to Christian beliefs, normal-turned-not-normal-person etc. The longest running of these has been Grimm (recently aired its 100th episode) and Lucifer just started this last January. So there are plenty more shows that could get on the market and take advantage of this system. But what does it matter? Why the sub-genre?
As I mentioned above I think it is born out of an easy way to get a “hit” show and extend it’s lifetime over multiple season. We haven’t eliminated murder so there are infinite ways for the paranormal sidekick to be useful in that respect but the problem is that, depending on the premise for the paranormal aspect and it’s development and depth, there is only so much paranormal to draw on. The success story being Grimm, which recently aired it’s 100th episode, and, besides shows that get cancelled in infancy, the great start but faltering Sleepy Hollow.
They also draw on rising popularity of science fiction and fantasy in television in general. While these have always been TV accessible genres, the number of these shows increases each year and expands out from network television into Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu productions as well. As technology expands and becomes more complex there are more ways for these to become interesting fiction stories and toe the line between explorations of science and fantastical uses of scientific premises. Essentially, PPPs combine the best of two worlds. The shows draw on two long standing-human fascinations, the obsession and fascination with death and of the inexplicable. Put them together and you generally have a pretty great show, even if it’s nothing like it’s source material.
The following blogs will explore some PPPs in more detail and examine how it is the paranormal premise, and not the police procedural portion, that appears to affect long-term watchability and consistency in a PPP.
