It started out with Medium, the series about a psychic working with the FBI
Now we have
Dresden Files on the SciFi Channel, about a wizard who works as a consultant with the Chicago police
Blood Ties, Lifetime Channel series about a former police detective who can’t see in the daylight and now she works with the police and vampires, particularly handsome ones
Raines, about a cop who solves crime by communicating with the dead
And SciFi Channel has raised from the dead “Special Unit 2” about a special unit of the Chicago police (again) who deal with supernatural creatures called “Links.”
I’m not complaining, I like all these series (so far) except Medium, which I find exceedingly soap-ish, even more so than Blood Ties. But I’m wondering where the meme sprung up among TV programmers that this was the Hot New Thing.
(Ghost Busty, er, Ghost Whisperer, and Supernatural not included because they’re not really cops/detectives. )
In Canada, in the early to mid 90’s there was a show called Forever Knight starring Geraint Wyn Davies as a police detective/vampirewho was several hundred years old. I believe it has become a cult show, at least according to the trivia on IMDb which says it was ranked in the top 25 cult shows ever.
This isn’t necessarily new. Angel (the Buffy spinoff) was on for five years, and it was about a heroic vampire detective. And Alien Nation put a sci-fi spin on police dramas.
If you watched the show, you would. Raines doesn’t talk to the dead; he imagines them, but knows they’re not real. They also don’t tell him anything he doesn’t know already.
As for the original question, it’s known as a “trend.” TV programmers are always looking for trends, and if a particular type of show is successful, then other shows follow in it’s past. Prior to CSI, there were no crime lab shows on TV; now there are many, and not just spinoffs.
Unless you have inside information, I think he would be very well advised to know he knows that, since it’s been repeated as fact over and over by the writers and producers of the show.
Are the books selling well? Dresden and the vampire series? Maybe that’s part of it.
Network TV is dipping their toes in the genre pool. They don’t want to dive in – Masters of Horror on Showtime was a bust – but they’ve seen the number$ for horror movies and want a family-friendly piece of the action.
It sorta bugs me. I read a review of Heart-Shaped Box today. The reviewer liked the book but (I assume) isn’t comfortable endorsing a “horror” novel, so he called it a “fantasy-tinged thriller”. It’s a straight-up ghost story, for pete’s sake.
God, I hope not. The concept of the victim changing as Raines’ opinion of her changed (when he learned she was a prostitute she briefly gained big hair, ridiculous makeup and started smoking and drinking until he was able to shake off his preconceptions about hookers) is what really hooked me on the show. If it’s yet anothe psychic cop show, I’m gone.
This is nothing new. There have always been cycles in TV shows. For a while Western-themed shows were very popular. There have been times when lawyer shows were all over the place. When ER first started, there was another show, Chicago Hope, that was set at a different Chicago hospital. Once a show gets popular it opens the door for imitators, or for people to say, “Hey, X is doing well, maybe this would be a good time to finally start a series based on my favorite books.” Dresden Files and Blood Ties are both examples of the latter. There’s another series, True Blood, starting on HBO based on Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse mystery novels (which I haven’t read yet, but have had highly recommended by the person who introduced me to the Dresden books.
I would say it started with Twin Peaks. While this show was in a completely different league from the ones being discussed here, in terms of everything from plot to pacing to design, it did feature an investigator who relied on premonitions and mystic rituals to solve the case.
Dresden Files sells pretty well, as shown by the books making a leap from just paperbacks to hard covers…
The Vicki Nelson books I have no idea about, though I’ve enjoyed them for awhile and only found out that they were making a show a few days ago.
And I’d say the deal is lots of people are willing to watch the shows, so they make them and try to catch on to the trend.
It’s a strong enough trend that there’s even a semi-spoof, PSYCHIC, where the protagonist uses Sherlock-Holmes-type deductions but pretends he’s psychic because people will believe the latter where they won’t believe the former.
And do you include the old NIGHT STALKER, a human detective after supernatural critters? Or is that a different genre, derived from Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula?
That’s just the way television, and to an extent movies and books, work. Something makes it big and you get a bunch of products that follow the trend. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings become hugely popular and you see a bunch of fantasy type movies. CSI becomes popular and suddenly you’ve got Bones and a few others I can’t think of. I think it’s just a simple case of “Hey, this show is popular, do we have anything like it?” Exactly why they made a Star Trek movie after seeing the success of Star Wars.
Personally, I don’t watch a lot of those shows because I’m sick and tired of the “supernatural/ass kicking chick” character. It was ok with Xena, even if I didn’t watch that show, and Buffy, but by the time they got to Serenity it got old and stale for me.