Posted on 07/23/2009 6:12:04 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Of the questions that have troubled great thinkers these last few thousand years, the question of which TV science show is the best has proved among the hardest to resolve. This is partly because the science shows on television keep changing, but it is also a fact that work in the field has, until lately, been spotty and lackadaisical, undertaken more often by desperate science writers for an afternoon than by a dedicated specialist for an entire year.
I want to thank the editors for giving me the time and space to pursue my own research to its full completion. Without further ado I can now reveal the best science show on television: Ghost Hunters, currently in its fifth preposterous season on cable television’s Syfy (né Sci Fi) Channel.
“No, it isn’t,” I hear you protest, and you have my sympathies, for that was my first reaction too. Like you, I subscribe to various high-end periodicals, where much has been written in recent years about the current golden age of science on television, and Ghost Hunters does not often get a mention.
For Virginia Postrel, writing in The Atlantic back in 2007, it was dramas like CSI and Numb3rs that were making braininess sexy and imparting a “geeky glamour” to the airwaves—and that was before the rise-to-total-dominance of House, a prime-time juggernaut whose climax each week involves a man having a scientific epiphany illustrated by an animated sequence of a corpuscle misinterpreting a hormonal signal from a gland. On the nonfiction side of the ledger, the pasture is even lusher and more science-y.
Even aside from your MythBusters and your How It’s Made, there are now entire channels whose raison d’être is to let people watch planets spinning and nebulas…nebulizing, all in high definition at four in the morning.........
Well, it is certainly not that the Ghost Hunters make braininess sexy; no, for that they would need more braininess. Lead investigator Jason Hawes, founder of the Atlantic Paranormal Society, not only looks like and has the same day job as Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher but carries himself with the same air of surly distrust, as if suspicious that the whole world might be encoded with hilarious bon mots at the expense of his sister.
Hawes’s sidekick, Grant Wilson, is a slighter, stooping man with a Dickensian underbite and a permanently queasy expression, as if he’s about to be hanged for stealing a sheep, and like Hawes he is approaching midlife without entirely having mastered the difference between phenomenon and phenomena. Those hoping against hope that the pair might be closet intellectuals were cruelly disabused in one recent episode when, upon rolling up to the supposedly haunted former home of novelist Edith Wharton and finding it to be a huge mansion, Jason squinted up at the crenellated frontage and, in lieu of a low whistle, murmured to Grant: “Yeah. I’m thinking she was a pretty good author.”......
No way dude! Golden Girls reruns rock! /s
I love this show.
Prefer Myth Busters but GH has it’s moments. The ones that I catch aren’t the violent poltergeist-type but Casper the friendly ghost variety. zzzz
I only find one problem with this show. While they are walking and searching, there is music playing in the background. Why music? Why not only the sound of Grant and Jason walking? Then, when they say listen, what was that?
the viewers could hear the same sounds they allegedly heard.
Makes sense does it not?
BS or not, I like that show too. Makes you think and learn some of the history of our country.
I went to high school w/ Grant Wilson.
That, and $2.50 will get me a cup of coffee.
On the rare occasion I do watch, I only pay attention to Donna, lol.
Well worth repeating!!
Ghost Hunters ping
BTW I forget who but there is a Freeper who once worked on the show in some production capacity. Not sure if that person still does.
LOL! Poor Jason and Grant. So looked-down-upon by self-important elitists. I like this show!
I can’t get a show in edgewise on the TIVO for all the Ghost Hunters Mrs. H-T records.
HAhaha! I’ve never watched it because I only had basic cable until recently. I did watch “Pinks;All Out” tonite and it was pretty cool! A LOT better than the old format.
I'd call BS on the show except now I'm haunted by Kris Williams...
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