Dramas with a hint of bizarre drawing viewers

By Tara Bennett

updated 2:34 p.m. ET Oct. 26, 2009

Television genres are like the tide: Some seasons all you see are procedurals, and then serialized shows are the rage, only to find the next year that it’s all about the comedies.

Of course, keeping to that metaphor, there’s been a lot of erosion across the board with generally shrinking audiences wooed away by a plethora of alt-entertainment distractions and rising on-demand viewing. And so the creative brains in Hollywood are always trying to tinker with what works today to discover what’s going to work tomorrow.

In particular is the case of the hybrid procedural. Standalone procedurals still rule the TV world with franchises like “CSI,” “NCIS” and “Law & Order” dominating their time slots, but there’s been plenty of evidence that certain audience factions are fatigued with the tidy storytelling. And that crack has opened the door for hybrid procedurals like “House,” “Bones,” “The Mentalist” and “Lie to Me,” which each solve cases per episode but also sneak in plenty of character development to keep audiences engaged.

But what's the next step for fans of hybrids? For the people who like their procedural dramas but also seek shows with some tasty morsels of the bizarre married with a touch of serialized storytelling.

Television has been catering to those niche audiences, too, through shows that infuse their procedurals with plenty of strange phenomena. Series like “Ghost Whisperer,” “Medium,” “Pushing Daisies,” and “Fringe” have found their place in the competitive landscape by using the dead, the freaky and the unexplainable as the backdrop for their procedurals. While some have been more successful than others (“Daisies” only lasted 22 episodes), most of them show remarkable resiliency.

“From the classic ‘The Twilight Zone’ to the cultish ‘The X-Files,’ unexplained phenomena will always have a place on television thanks to our never-ending fascination with the unknown," says Tracy Phillips, Senior Editor at Fancast.com and one who follows these kinds of hybrids. “Supernatural crime solvers were the next logical progression of procedurals to counter the burnout that followed when straight-shooters like ‘CSI’ and ‘Law & Order’ started spawning faster than ‘Jon & Kate.’”

The trendsetters
Arguably this latest hybrid trend kicked off back in 2005 with the premiere of “Medium” on NBC and “Ghost Whisperer” on CBS. Both are still on the air and have amassed incredibly loyal fan bases that love the non-traditional mix of investigation storytelling through heroines who get their sleuthing backup from the beyond.

P.K. Simonds, an executive producer on “Ghost Whisperer” for three years, says while some initially in the industry thought the concept of the show was too high-concept, it’s proven to be a perfect fit.

“Part of the reason for doing a hybrid show in the first place is that you know audiences engage with certain things,” Simonds explains. “The thing they engage with is mystery, always. For instance, the Harry Potter books are all mysteries if you break them down to their structure. There always has and always will be a thirst in your audience for stories with mystery at the core. Then when you think of spiritualism and the occult, they are all about mystery as well. There is so much that we sense as thinking, feeling beings that go on around us in the world that we just don’t understand. Yet we know those things are out there and we sense there is a great deal to the universe that we can’t explain so it doesn’t feel like a stretch to marry the elements of the unknown...with the individual mystery stories that make our show.”

The hybrid approach also allows the writers to tinker with the formula to keep the storytelling fresh, a luxury straight procedurals don’t have or can’t often take.

“We feel like with each episode we have an obligation to present a certain amount of each of the key ingredients of the hybrid blend,” Simonds says. “What we change each week is the balance. Some weeks we have less procedural and more supernatural or comedy or romance. We constantly vary the mixture so that audiences come to expect that things will be different week to week...and to make sure that you are delivering what those significant segments of your audience are looking for in your show.

"Last season we tried a big experiment for the show which was to serialize the season in a way we had never done, building around core relationships among our regulars," he said. "That took us away from the occult mystery of the week stuff we had been doing previously, but it turned out to really connect for the audience. It reminded us that we can lean more heavily on our ensemble characters and their lives for storytelling and it works. Now this season we are venturing deeper into the unseen and untapped phenomenon of the beyond. We can also tell crime dramas and mysteries and all kinds of things and accommodate them in the confines of this show without the audience feeling like they are watching a different show. That’s frankly something our competitors can’t do because they are bound by rules of logic and science and physics that we don’t have to worry about.”

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