Starting on December 10, 2007, the new series Paranormal State began airing on the A&E Television Network. The series consisted of twenty 30-minute episodes which aired on Monday nights. Many weeks featured two episodes while near the end of it’s run, the network showed one episode per Monday evening.

A television show about the paranormal, even when that show is “reality” based, one must keep in mind that the producers first and foremost want to entertain their audience. So to be fair when one is reviewing a show it first must be judged on it’s entertainment value. Not doing so does a disservice to the viewers and to the readers.

However, a reality base paranormal show should also be judged on it’s credibility and it’s ability to make it’s audience think. So to sum up, it should:

• Entertain
• Have Credibility
• Thought provoking

So let’s examine how Paranormal State measured up in these important goals.

Entertainment

We must say that for the majority of the episodes we felt the show was entertaining. After watching each episode, generally we were glad we tuned in. No series can avoid the occasional lemon and Paranormal State had it’s share. We felt “Man of the House” and “Beer, Wine and Spirits” were good.

A couple of clunkers were “Haunted Piano” and “Freshman Fear”.

Credibility

The show definitely had a couple controversial moments. Of course the most controversial were the “demon” episodes at the start of the series. The postings about the demon name and a second posting about the demon kept your favorite editor at Spectral Review up late into Tuesday morning extracting frames.

It’s important to know the back story on this demon controversy. Ryan Buell was able to explain this back story on a Ghostology interview recently. To paraphrase quickly, Ryan explains how he was involved a few years earlier in a demonic possession and exorcism with the Catholic Church. He was told at the end of that case by a priest that he may be targeted in the future. In other words the demons “knew his name” now and may return at some point in a future case. Ryan agreed that his particular demon could easily be lying on who it was, only pretending to be such a high level demon. Please give the interview a listen as Ryan explains this story better than I can here. Anyway, I think the back story takes a little bit of the controversy away and a bit more credence to Ryan’s story.

A second controversy the show had was the “School House Haunting” where Shannon Sylvia from Ghost Hunters International appears as a client on the episode. Shannon has explained that she did the show before being offered the GHI gig but it still looks bad to see a person as a ghost hunter one night then a client the next. Makes the viewers wonder a bit if it’s all on the up and up.

Thought Provoking

The show was definitely thought provoking. They had several episodes that tried to examine different aspects of the paranormal field and human nature. One such episode was “Paranormal Intervention” where a woman had been obsessing about capturing EVPs and Ryan and the team tried to get her to stop worrying so much about them and just to enjoy her life.

Another episode “The Sensitive” we saw as the show unfolded that the young girl who was the subject of the haunting may be psychic. Chip Coffey, the psychic who made several appearances on the show felt like she was sensitive. It was interesting to see someone come to the realization that they might be a psychic.

Conclusion

It took a pretty big chunk of the series for us to realize that the show wasn’t about gathering evidence of the paranormal. In all twenty episodes the evidence amounted to a few EVPs and thats about it. It showed the importance of historical research of the property in question, the fact that people have hauntings and the most important thing is to help these people.

So we are looking forward to a second season. Let’s see what Ryan and PRS came do next.

The DVD of season one is available at the A&E store.