The Ghost Hunters name is starting to rival CSI and Law & Order in the spinoff department. What else do all three of these franchises share? There's just as much hard paranormal evidence in the last two as appears in the first.
Please don't misunderstand me -- since I've gone off on this topic before. I'm not saying ghosts don't exist. I'm not saying there's no afterlife. I don't begrudge any scientific investigation into parapsychology or realms described as paranormal. I'd just like any of the endless march of "ghost-based" shows to dig up one scintilla of proof that they found something and, therefore, deserve to be on TV every week.
The latest entry is Syfy's Ghost Hunter's Academy -- sort of Most Haunted meets The Rookies from the 70s. Each week, ghost hunting "professors" (the show's conceit, not mine) Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango welcome first-time paranormal investigators onto The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) team.
Cartoon Network's Star Wars: The Clone Wars just might be the best action/adventure show on television. Come to think of it, it might be the only true action/adventure show on television.
But, as the show ramps up the action content and significantly sweetens its visuals, its increased intensity might be driving away some younger viewers.
As The Clone Wars moves through its second season, the war is growing -- both in scope and violence. Viewers are seeing more dead Clonetroopers, more crashed vehicles and more beloved characters in deadly jeopardy.
Its ratings continue to cruise in hyperspace (especially for males), but I wonder if the darker tones of season two could drive younger kids and their parents away from the show.
(S05E07) "The answers are there, but you have to know when to look." - Carl the Watcher
Starting this week, TV Squad now offers regular reviews of CBS' Ghost Whisperer. What an episode to start reviews with! The first episode of November Sweeps offered us more backstory and mythology about the shadows, some of their powers, the book ... and Jennifer Love Hewitt in lingerie doing some pole dancing!
We were also treated to a case of the week that kept us guessing as to who was to blame for the death of now-ghost Tina and what secret Dr. Morgan and President Bedford were hiding.
Syfy has become known not just for cheesy sci-fi and horror flicks but also remakes, or "reimaginings," of several classic films and shows. They had Children of the Corn recently, they had Tin Man (a modern take on The Wizard of Oz), and they have an Alien Nation remake in the works (not to mention Quantum Leap).
They're also doing Alice, which is their take on Alice in Wonderland. Here's the trailer. It premieres December 6.
The "Ask TV Squad" column, published every Wednesday, answers your questions about current and past TV shows, as well as about the celebrities appearing on TV. Every week, I will pick a question (or more) sent to us and provide answers in the column. If your question is not picked for a column, it may be answered in a subsequent column or in TV Squad's APB Podcast.
To submit questions to the "Ask TV Squad" column, you can post them below in comments or email them to asktvsquad@gmail.com.
This week, I answer questions about Ghost Whisperer, How to Make It in America and Better Off Ted.
Since we're in a Halloween mood tonight, let's talk about Night Gallery, one of the scariest shows I remember from my childhood. Conceived and hosted by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, the series ran from 1970 to 1973 and featured some well known actors, including William Windom, Burgess Meredith, John Astin and James Farentino.
While The Twilight Zone always seemed more sci-fi based, Night Gallery had more of a horror feel to it and featured more ghostly, psychological stories. In short, it scared the crap out of me. One of the scariest episodes focused on two stories about some spooky real estate: "The House / Certain Shadows on the Wall."
Part of my Halloween tradition is to watch the Ghost Hunters Halloween Livespecial, broadcast (live, of course) from some spooky place somewhere in the country. Tonight, the crew is at the Essex County Hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, along with some recruits from the new Ghost Hunters Academy, which premieres Wed., Nov. 11 at 10/9c.
It's pretty cool because you can log into the Syfy Web site and watch the live feeds on several cameras positioned around the hospital in dark tunnels and ancient rooms. There's even one in the morgue. If you see something suspicious, you're supposed to hit the "Panic Button" and the team will go check it out like hungry hound dogs.
I'm not sure what's so intriguing about all of this, but it's pretty fun. Maybe it's the interactive nature of viewers helping the team search for ghosts. Is anyone else watching? Have you seen anything spooky on the live-feed cameras? I haven't, but I'm still looking!
SyFy has picked up the rights to broadcast an American version of the BBC show Being Human. For those who are unaware, Being Human is about a twenty-something ghost, a werewolf and a vampire that live together, each with their own set of melodramatic problems. It's a bit like a supernatural Melrose Place.
Actually, given the context of the program, it would go much better on The CW. But that's not likely at this point. They already have The Vampire Diaries anyway.
While relaunching Americanized versions of Brit shows has been successfully done on television before (such as The Office), it's the first time that I'm aware that SyFy has tried it. Usually they have new versions of old television shows with hit-or-miss results (there was Battlestar Galactica, and then there was Flash Gordon).
The BBC series was okay but not great. If the British makers of the show are lucky, SyFy won't butcher it beyond recognition.
If you're a fan of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and you want to know what happened between Season One and the now-running Season Two, you're going to need a video game system.
The story in the new game, Star Wars: The Clone Wars - "Republic Heroes" bridges the gap between the show's first two runs, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and their loyal Clone Trooper comrades take on a new Separatist enemy packing a freshly polished doomsday weapon.
Available for PS3, Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360, "Republic Heroes" lets you play as a Jedi Knight or as a Clone Trooper -- depending on where you are in the game and what choices you make as a player.
While perusing around SlashControl tonight, I nearly stopped breathing when I came across Babylon 5. Not just a few episodes or even one or two seasons. All five seasons, 99 episodes total.
My sci-fi-loving mom taped the entire series on VHS, and I have the first few seasons on DVD. But what a thrill to find it on SlashControl. If you're not familiar with J. Michael Straczynski's groundbreaking show, it takes place in the year 2258, ten years after an Earth-Minbari War. Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) takes command of a giant five-mile-long cylindrical space station, orbiting a planet in neutral space.
The new Columbia Pictures disaster epic, 2012, proposes what many New Age folk believe is inevitable. The Roland Emmerich movie looks ahead to December 21, 2012 as the end of the world because the Mayan Calendar cycle ends on that day.
So, the cinematic seas rise, and the ground shakes -- sending scores of mid-range stars scrambling for their lives. Syfy previews both the movie and its long-held cataclysm theory on a new special, 2012: Startling New Secrets. Premiering Sunday, November 8 at 9 p.m., the two-hour show "delves into the Mayan Mystery surrounding 2012."
I'm going out on a limb here and predicting the show will fail to ask the obvious question: If the Mayans were so adept at looking centuries into the future to predict the end of the world, why weren't they clairvoyant enough to foresee the end of their long-extinct civilization and prevent its collapse?
If a show like Top Chef never found a meal, would you watch it? If Ice Road Truckers couldn't find snow, would you pay attention?
Yet, every week, paranormal investigation shows like Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State hit the air and unveil the whole pile of absolute squat they found. Now, there's a new contender in the "Hey! Look! We found pretty much nothing!" category with the Discovery Channel's Ghost Lab.
Each week two thick slabs of Texas beef named Brad and Barry Klinge (right) take their Everyday Paranormal investigation team out into the wild haunted yonder. They come armed with their traveling "ghost lab" -- a 24-foot car hauler "capable of providing 200,000 watts of electricity to power audio, video and photo analysis stations; flat-screen televisions and an interactive touch-screen smartboard."
It's a rare, disturbing sight to watch a television show torn to pieces -- literally.
While on my set visit for Stargate Universe at Bridge Studios in Vancouver, I stayed with the main press tour. It took us from the main stage holding the massive set of the starship Destiny across the expansive lot to a series off small office buildings housing the show's costume shop and editing bays.
The route took us past the sound stage that once housed the production for ABC's Defying Gravity. Of course, the ambitious prime time sci-fi drama was canceled early this fall season. So, the cast and crew were long gone.
The sounds coming out of that distant sound stage were strangely tragic. There was the grinding of band saws, the pounding of sledgehammers and the growling of large cranes -- all working together to tear the show's elaborate sets to pieces.
The writers and producers of Syfy's Stargate Universe could've played it safe and got along just fine with their latest series.
After Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 feature film from MGM, the series' first TV adaption (SG1) arrived in 1997. When you throw in the follow-up series, Infinity and Atlantis, the Stargate franchise has run on TV in one form or another for more than 12 years.
When the time came to invent the next step in the franchise, show-runners Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper could have trotted out more of the same and done perfectly well. Instead, they upped the ante -- bringing a bigger budget and updated production techniques to Stargate Universe.
MGM and Syfy welcomed journalists to Vancouver's Bridge Studios to explore the show's starship Destiny set and discover how this series cruises beyond its successful predecessors.
The name "Max Headroom" comes from the last thing TV reporter Edison Carter saw before he was knocked out and hacker extraordinaire Bryce Lynch dumped his memories into a computer: a sign reading "Max. Headroom: 2.3 meters" as a warning for low clearance. The program came alive and an '80s icon was born. Most people today remember Max Headroom for his pervasive commercial association with New Coke.
Yet it was in the Max Headroom series that he was truly groundbreaking. The show was developed from a UK telefilm: Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future. And that film was only created to give back-story to a talking head they wanted to use in a music video show.
Unfortunately, the popularity of this show and the character lasted about as long as New Coke. And for those of you who have no idea what New Coke is ... exactly!
The Ghost Hunters name is starting to rival CSI and Law & Order in the spinoff department. What else do all three of these franchises share? There's just as much hard paranormal evidence in the last two as appears in the first.
Cartoon Network's Star Wars: The Clone Wars just might be the best action/adventure show on television. Come to think of it, it might be the only true action/adventure show on television.
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SyFy has 
If you're a fan of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and you want to know what happened between Season One and the now-running Season Two, you're going to need a video game system.
The new Columbia Pictures disaster epic, 2012, proposes what many New Age folk believe is inevitable. The Roland Emmerich movie looks ahead to December 21, 2012 as the end of the world because the Mayan Calendar cycle ends on that day.
If a show like Top Chef never found a meal, would you watch it? If Ice Road Truckers couldn't find snow, would you pay attention?
It's a rare, disturbing sight to watch a television show torn to pieces -- literally.
The writers and producers of Syfy's Stargate Universe could've played it safe and got along just fine with their latest series.
The TV Squad Podcast: Linda Purl talks about The Office, we talk spoilers, and more
Ask TV Squad: Ghost Whisperer and more!
The TV Squad Podcast: Bill Scheft of The Late Show, Cake Boss, Mad Men and more
