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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.
How is it, then, that the best science show on TV turns out to be a low-budget and in many ways deeply stupid offering about two Roto-Rooter plumbers who spend their weekends shuffling around old buildings in the dark, interpreting every distant thump as a “footstep” and every draft-powered swish of a curtain as a lonely dead child whispering “Chrisss”?
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.”
