How NOT to make a TV show for the pseudoscience networks
I've gotten close a few times, but I always saw that the end was near. Here's what they did wrong.
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Once or twice a year, I get a call from a production company trying to pitch a show to a network, and asking me to be a co-host on some speculative show about some mystery or another. I’ve done this three or four times — shown up and shot a pilot or a teaser — none of them have ever gone to air, as there are probably a hundred such pitches for every one that makes it onto HISTORY or Nat Geo or Travel or one of the other “usual suspects” of woo programming.
They nearly always pitch me with “We want our two hosts to be a skeptic and a believer,” with me (obviously) being the skeptic.
It’s because I’m so photogenic and charismatic.
Well, let this post serve as notice to all future producers planning to contact me: I think the “skeptic and believer” concept is a terrible one. This is why there are no TV shows featuring a skeptic and a believer. They don’t mix. It’s not a “buddy picture” thing. These are two fundamentally different ways of approaching a subject. As a skeptic, I’d make a show like The UFO Movie which teaches the wonders of astronomy and how we know what we know. Notice that I did not include any “UFO personalities” in the film or give them a platform to promote their mythology as if it might be real. It’s not, so that’s not outreach I’m willing to participate in.
By the same token, a believer is going to want to do nothing but tell the wild, amazing stories — in point of fact, to misinform. If the cast truly consisted or a real skeptic and a real believer, nothing would get done. The show would suck.
Today I’d like to tell you what happened a couple of years ago when one of these producers called me up, and asked me to be the skeptic paired with a believer, to go down to Ecuador and shoot a miniseries about La Cueva de los Tayos (Cave of the Oilbirds), a cave inside of which wooists have long believe is an alien library — a sophisticated mechanism of metal and crystal and laser beams, containing the knowledge of an ancient alien civilization.