Just watched one last night, S02E07 of Third Watch. It’s a Cops and Fire and Paramedics show which I really liked from the late 90s and early 00s, various usual New York stuff.
However in that episode, “After Hours”, the Cops/Firemen/Paramedics witness a burning wreck of four kids dying which they got to too late, and go and blow off steam that night. During that night they meet the ghosts of the four kids who died. Bowling with two of them, getting help from one, and helping another across central park.
Something I see a lot in shows and movies that are otherwise grounded in the non-supernatural world:
Whenever a fortune teller comes into play for whatever reason, their predictions always seem to come to pass. A made-up example might be, a cynical detective questions a fortune teller in the course of an investigation. The fortune teller says “beware, a friend will betray you” the detective says “yeah, right”, and later on it turns out their trusted partner turns out to be in league with the bad guys.
At least Monk played that one right. Whenever it looked like prophecies were coming true, it was because the prophesier was in on it (or had been feed the information in some way by someone who was in on it) (unless there’s a case I’m forgetting).
You always gotta start small though: “Beware the gift that turns foul”. Gets a free coffee and the lid pops off. “Could it be the fortun-- haha, no way this just a coincidence! Or is it?”
The Rockford Files did an episode where a self-professed psychic claimed that Jim was withholding information in an important case. All of his supposed visions had mundane explanations; cold readings, bugs in Jim’s car and trailer, and an informant within the police department (an early role for Bonnie Bartlett).
No, I don’t have a great memory; it was just on yesterday.
Similarly, in an episode of Leverage about a psychic medium, the whole plot centered around the medium being a deliberate fraud with no ambiguity whatsoever. The team of thieves and con artists are disgusted by the fact that he’s taking advantage of grieving people, and they explain in some detail to one of the team who’s briefly taken in (and the audience) how he uses cold and hot reading techniques to fake his powers.
(Of course, that whole show relies on the effectively supernatural abilities of its characters, but within the context of their fictional universe, they’re just hyper-competent).
There was the episode where a dwarf claimed to be a were-elephant; he would vanish and sure enough an elephant would turn up. Although it was all part of a clever scam.
Somehow in my memory of Green Acres had a lot of absurdist humor. My personal favorite is the episode where Oliver decides to paint the house and it turns out the house is made of “living wood” that needed to breathe.
I haven’t watched enough episodes to know WHEN they even inferred that a “Higher power” was behind everything. Course once you do that, the Devil is going to show up (sigh)
I remember another Nancy Drew series from years ago that indeed had her investigating real mysteries. I really liked it. I guess everything needs a hook nowadays.
In the trilogy of Mr. Belvedere movies starring Clifton Webb as the titular character, Belvedere is depicted as a polymath hypergenius who is all but superhumanly competent at everything he turns his hand to. But the flat-out impossible occurs at the end of Mr. Belvedere Goes to College when a copy of Look magazine is presented that has on its cover a photo that was taken only moments before.
I remember that one. It was one example of a recurring theme on that show:
Oliver tries to repair/modernize some feature of his home or farm;
the locals explain why that’s impossible because of some absurd idiosyncrisy;
Oliver tries anyway and fails;
He resorts to calling in an outside expert who confirms that the locals were right in that there’s some incredibly obscure or obsolete reason why the repair or modernization is impossible.
Once he sent a piece of wood to the university, they confirmed that the pore key spring was broken, and one they fixed it (and found the pore key!) the wood would take paint. Nothing supernatural at all!
