Well, I admit that I am a big fan of Discovery channel (and this is partly due to my science background), most of whose programs attract me a lot, no matter from the content or from the way that they tell stories. So, yes, you bet, this week I will talk about the programs in Discovery channel again.
“Psychic Witness” is one of the programs in Investigation Discovery, which could be seen from the weblink http://investigation.discovery.com/videos/psychic-witness-recovery-of-stacy.html. This series have six stories documenting real-life cases of situations in which police department have enlisted the aid of psychics in solving difficult cases.
This series attract me, firstly because of the specialty of the topic. Psychic witness, an interesting but controversial topic, has little scientific credibility from public perspective. Although psychologists, researchers, and other authors have posited a number of possible explanations for the belief that some can provide valuable crime information from psychic abilities, but belief in psychic help still sounds incredible for most of the people, and the police departments also offer a few credit to psychic aid. A 1993 survey of police departments in the 50 largest cities in the United States revealed that a third of them had accepted predictions from psychic detectives in the past, although only seven departments treated such information any differently to information from an ordinary source.
For me, anything unable to be understood from scientific angle now does not mean unscientific in future, and sometimes, it may be just because our today’s science does not develop that far to help people understand these phenomena. This is just like cellphone today should be regarded as something hard to understand if it appears in 1000 years ago. For those kind of things, if there is no evidence to completely turn them down now, I would rather hold a neutral attitude. But, as a TV program relating to science, does this kind of topic seem away from science? How do the program producer balance revealing some true phenomena happening in reality and holding a scientific attitude so that audiences wouldn’t feel like it advocates something unscientific?
From the series, I find the way that the producers solve the balance problem is that in the stories they involve voices from different sides, such as, policemen who believes the effectiveness of psychic aid and who is skeptical, and real feelings of psychics about their careers etc, which all contribute to the neutral standpoint of the series.
Another thing that makes the series attactive is how the program develop stories. I notice that the six stories involve six ways that the psychics help policemen so that each story is unique and audiences do not feel boring. I also notice each story begins with a hook or a question that arises audiences’ interest to wonder what is going on in each case. And as the stories are going on, they involve hunmanized characters, and use lots of close-shots of people’s actions, facial experiences, and close-to-feelings background music, as well as natural sound bridges which vividly rebuild the scenes and make audiences feel real. Besides, I also notice whenever they use actors to rebuild the scences, they will label them as “damatization” to let people distinguish which is real document and which are dramatic effects.
StoryHouse productions have also produced a TV program about psychic detectives, which won The Truly Terrible Television (TTTV) Award for peddling pseudoscience and superstition to its audience by the Independent Investigative Group in August, 2007. And we could also see it as the success of telling this kind of stories.
Zhengzheng Zhang 