The difference between fright and wrong

KARLA PETERSON

 

There is a lot we don't know about the paranormal universe. We don't know if ghosts exist, if the dead can talk or if demons are real. But there is one truth about the supernatural world you can bet on. It you want to make an entertaining TV show about it, it's better if you make it all up.

Following in the spooky footsteps of the successful “Medium” and this fall's promising “Moonlight,” two shows debuting this week feed into television's current obsession with all things dark and unexplainable. Both the new “Paranormal State” and the returning “Life on Mars” really want to freak you out, but only one of them succeeds. And it isn't the one where the ghosts might really be real.

Debuting tonight on A&E, “Paranormal State” follows the real-life adventures of the Paranormal Research Society, a group of Penn State University students dedicated to helping the living cope with the activities of the dead.

With a cast of photogenic collegiate investigators and cases involving haunted houses, roving demons and a bright little kid who sees dead people, “Paranormal State” should make you want to curl up with a big bowl of popcorn and a gun loaded with silver bullets – the better to enjoy the monsters before blowing them away.

Instead, the first two episodes will have you fumbling for a Red Bull and the remote, the better to stay awake long enough to change the channel.

As the Sci-Fi Channel's equally erratic “Ghost Hunters” series proves, the problem with ghosts and demons in real life is that they are rather camera shy. So in spite of the sophisticated audio and video equipment used by founder Ryan Buell and his “Paranormal” team, the show's spirit sightings boil down to a ho-hum collection of ominous noises, the occasional self-opening door, and pronouncements like, “There are bad things here.”

Which brings us to the show's biggest problem. The boyish Buell and the gang may be accomplished ghost-hunters, but they are inexperienced and ineffectual performers.

Whether he is sharing his childhood traumas with a fellow hauntee or adding audio entries to his director's log (“I have the feeling that time is of the essence here”), Buell looks self-conscious and sounds like he is reading from cue cards. The remaining three members of the core team – two of whom are identified as “trainees” – don't seem confident or mature enough to take on a crabby Starbucks' manager, much less a demonic presence.

Enough eerie things happen in tonight's back-to-back episodes of “Paranormal State” to make the paranormal seem possible, but neither the show nor its young stars have the entertainment chops to make the paranormal seem particularly interesting.

The same cannot be said for “Life on Mars.” Making its stateside debut tomorrow on BBC America, Season 2 of “Life on Mars” continues to follow the otherworldly adventures of Sam Tyler, a British police detective who gets hit by a car in the present and wakes up in 1973.

“Am I mad? In a coma? Or back in time?” Sam asks, in the introduction. He doesn't know, and neither do we. But even with the time-shifting plotlines and the thick, mind-altering English accents, one thing about “Life on Mars” is very clear. It isn't a real paranormal story, just a really good one.

Like NBC's under-performing “Journeyman” and the CW's consistently compelling “Supernatural” – which returns from its post-Thanksgiving break with a creepy Christmas episode on Thursday – “Life on Mars” is a sort of paranormal procedural about a regular guy trying to solve crimes while being haunted by persistent demons.

In the case of “Journeyman,” the guy is a time-traveling journalist on an era-jumping mission that remains a mystery, even to him. In “Supernatural,” the guys are two twentysomething brothers trying to rid the world of vampires, shape-shifters and other monsters while tracking down the demons who killed their parents.

Things are not any easier in “Life on Mars,” where Sam in the '70s has rejoined the same Manchester police squad that employed him in the 2000s. In addition to schooling his cave-man colleagues in the subtleties of forensics and the drawbacks of beating potential suspects with tape dispensers, Sam has to figure out how he ended up in the '70s and why.

In the meantime, he still has to solve crimes, some of which are being committed by men Sam knows will be doing very bad things 30 years in the future. His job is complicated by the fact that he hears voices from his hospital-room present, where he appears to be in a coma. And by the fact that the television talks to him, and he is sometimes slammed into walls by unseen forces.

All of this is much weirder than the relatively simple hauntings of “Paranormal State,” but because of the criminally sharp scripts, the swaggering characters and John Simms' deft and devastating performance as our time-warped hero, “Life on Mars” is much easier to believe.
The ghosts and demons of “Paranormal State” may be real, which is more than you can say for whatever is swinging Sam Tyler around by the neck. But it takes entertainment experts like the “Life on Mars” team to make you care enough to get really scared.

Careless showbiz executives might look at the success of “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and the supernaturally inclined “Lost” and “Heroes” and think that viewers in our anxious post-9/11 world just want ghosts and creepy crawlies. But what we really love are ghost stories and the characters who tell them. When it comes to real chills and thrills, reality is overrated.