In the USA we're seeing a succession of TV drama series with themes based on the (mildly) paranormal: ghosts, regression, mediums, mentalists, peculiar happenings.
Medium - Lead character has dreams predicting crimes about to happen, or giving clues which help to solve crimes.
Mentalist - Guy who refuses to say he is psychic, but assists in solving crimes via skills which he says are purely due to observation and mental shenanigans.
Psychic - Similar to above, but lead character pretends to be psychic, though viewers are aware that he is using only observation skills.
Ghost Whisperer - Lead character sees ghosts, helps them to "go into the light" after dealing with unfinished business of one sort or another.
Fringe - Storylines focus on "stange" happenings, something akin to Twilight Zone (no relation), or The X-Files.
Past Lives - An expert in the study of regression, with an ex-cop as side-kick, helps people who have troubling regression episodes stemming from problems in past lives.
There might be more - those are series of which we've watched at least a couple of episodes.
It's good that these subjects are surfacing in a format accessible to the average person, who is otherwise uninterested in the genre. Even though, in Mentalist and Psychic, there is continual emphasis on "there's no such thing as a psychic", anyone with any insight at all realises that to have extraordinarily ultra-sharp observation skills is itself beyond normal: an extra-sensory excess.
Still no sign of any drama involving an astrologer, or astrology. I find this to be very odd. Astrology is probably more in the public eye daily, in newspapers and magazines, than any of the above topics, yet no writer seems to want to use it in a drama. I wonder why?
