“Some man is going to go after you. Beware” is the kind of could-mean-anything meaningless statements that cold readers love. It could just mean that Mr. Wrong is going to try to pursue a relationship with her, which I’m willing to bet is something that happens to most women.
Exactly. I just reread the script and it was foreshadowed brilliantly, but the line was the best of surprises: totally unexpectedly, but completely logical.
And then there’s the twist in the final shot…
It’s been years, and I may have misquoted the psychic, I was paraphrasing. She indicated Molly was “in danger from some man” and should beware. A strange man was mistakenly invited into her apartment and that almost went terribly wrong. Coincidence? ‘Could happen to anyone’, or was it a premonition?
Veronica Mars is 99.9% rooted in skeptical reality. Veronica occasionally talks to her dead friend Lily, but it’s very clearly just in her head. Except for two incidents, which weirdly stick out:
(a) a television medium seems to have an awful lot of information about Lily that she shouldn’t, even given the publicity surrounding the case
(b) Veronica’s about to get on a bus, then she sees a Lily-esque figure darting around a corner. She chases it, misses the bus, and thus doesn’t die when the bus goes over a cliff
Both incidents stick out weirdly. I guess the first foreshadows the second, but the idea is dropped thereafter, and it really doesn’t fit into the tone of the show.
Bumping cause i somehow got stuck watching some Green Acres…*
…Arnold has human-level intelligence, can understand humans, can be understood by some and…can ride a bicycle??
I don’t remember much Green Acres, but I guess it might not qualify cause it seems to be as grounded in reality as a Monty Python sketch.
*Eddie Albert has great timing is what I came away with.
The last episode of the first Dallas series had Larry Hagman’s character given the “It’s A Wonderful Life” treatment by a supernatural being, the first twist being that pretty much everyone turned out better without him being there, and the second twist being that the supernatural being (played by Joel Grey) wasn’t an angel after all, but the devil.
Not to mention the Eiffel Tower being in Washington, DC.
Or Lisa reacting to the list of credits. “I’m waiting for the ‘Ditected by.’”
The show would do anything for a joke.
I’ve always assumed that the writers for “Green Acres” had access to some really good drugs. 
One show I haven’t seen mentioned in the thread was NewsRadio. They had one episode that took place on a space station, and another that took place on the Titanic.
Various episodes of Northern Exposure.
Joel, Shelly, Ed and others all had spiritual and mystical experiences.
Just re-read the thread to make sure this one wasn’t here already, because I recently saw another one: There was an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Barney somehow gets ahold of a “tarot” deck (in quotes because it doesn’t contain the same cards as a real tarot deck) that apparently grants wishes. Any one of the wishes, individually, could be written off as an odd coincidence (for instance, Opie wishing to get a B in math, or wishing that he’d have the same teacher next year), but they all seem to come true.
I mentioned this in another thread that was titled something like “otherwise normal shows that had one WTF episode”:
‘The Waltons’ was, in general, a pretty naturalistic depiction of a depression-era family in Virginia, but there was one episode where, just before the youngest Walton girl Elizabeth’s 13th birthday, all sorts of strange, spooky things started happening— kitchen cupboards flying open, dishes breaking with no one around, the piano playing by itself. Elizabeth’s Raggety Ann doll in her room even started moving as if it had come alive.
I figured it would turn out to be one of the Walton boys playing tricks, but it was straight-up poltergeist activity, triggered by Elizabeth’s angst at soon ‘becoming a woman’. Once she came to terms with her childhood ending, the poltergeist activity stopped.
The longer a “serious” show goes on the more likely eventually supernatural elements will pop in for absolutely no reason.
There’s so many episodes of JAG involving Ghosts by the 6th season. Did the writers really run out of ideas that quickly?
One can go back 400 years and find great examples in Shakespeare of just what the OP is asking about; for example, the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Hamlet, or the three witches in Macbeth. These were certainly not “supernatural” plays. Shakespeare intended them to be true-to-life, and audiences of the day would have accepted them that way, since belief in ghosts and witchcraft was widespread and taken as a fact of life.
Today we regard these “supernatural” elements merely as metaphors for a means for the protagonist to be given information that motivates his actions – Hamlet’s quest for revenge, or Macbeth’s murderous ambitions. They’re otherwise irrelevant to the plot, which is really about the failings of human nature.
Providence was a show that was about a doctor and her life with two adult siblings, their dad, and her niece. Pretty standard family-themed drama. Except her mother’s ghost was also a reoccurring character.
In the first season of Mission: Impossible, the episode “Zubrovnik’s Ghost” had them investigating a murder. The widow believed in psychics, so the IMF sent their own to counteract the enemy psychic who told her her husband wanted her to defect.
The ending was pure Twilight Zone.
Here’s the setup:
Good morning, Mr. Briggs. You remember Dr. Martha Richards. Two years ago while on vacation in Austria, she met and married Dr. Kurt Zubrovnik. She never returned to America, continuing her extremely important research work with her husband in Austria. About a year ago Kurt Zubrovnik was burned to death in a laboratory fire in their home. Martha went on working after her husband’s death, but recently stopped sending us the results of her experiments. We have reason to believe it because this man, Sigismund Poljac, is pressuring her to work behind the Iron Curtain. If it were an ordinary pressure, we could fight it but Poljac is a medium and Martha Zubrovnik is being asked to defect by the ghost of her dead husband. Mr. Briggs, your mission, should you decide to accept it, would be to keep her from going behind the Iron Curtain and get her working for us again. As always should you or any member of your IMF Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Please dispose of this recording in the usual manner.
Except that one of the pieces of evidence he introduced was a piece of paper with an old coffee stain. At the end of the episode Becket accidently spills coffee on some paperwork she’s doing, producing the exact same coffee stain.
And then there was the episode where a teen was apparently killed by telekinesis. It turned out she wasn’t, it was done by clever fakery; but when they were chasing a suspect a cafeteria table somehow flew across the room to block them.
Those particular episodes were pretty explicitly set up as “What If?” episodes, not really reality breaking or super natural or whatever.
Similar to the Gilligans Island ep I was thinking of when trying to decide which one broke reality the most.
On Frasier, Daphne could always tell when Lilith arrived in and departed from Seattle, even without being forewarned. Usually it was in the form of headaches or other feelings of impending evil, followed by sweet relief.
There was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where aliens tested Janeway’s faith in science against the supernatural. “Even when she’s seen the evidence with her own eyes, she refuses to believe,” or something of that sort.
I vote for the “Jack and the Beanstalk” episode, where Mary Ann wore the French Maid outfit. 
(It was, of course. all a dream.)
On second thought, it was probably the one with the voodoo dolls, where the castaways were all given a hotfoot by the native with the torch.