A&E’s reality show Paranormal State follows a team from Penn State’s Paranormal Research Society as they investigate alleged supernatural phenomena in people’s homes.  Season Three’s spooks include ghosts, spirits, a vampire, and demons.  Ryan Buell, with the most wooden delivery ever, leads the team of mostly college students with the occasional help from a psychic or priest, to ferret out a paranormal reason for happenings and miraculously make it stop.
 

I like to find good and bad in the shows I review, but wow is Paranormal State awful.  Cheesetastic doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Normally with unexplained phenomena, researchers start from a point of skepticism and rule out all logical alternatives before jumping on the ghost/demon/vampire train, but the PRS team starts with a paranormal theory and runs with it, fitting their “evidence” to their theory.  That evidence is sketchy at best and it’s ludicrous that each episode features college students making remarkable paranormal finds. 
 

Paranormal State does a disservice to the featured families by playing up their troubles to the nth degree and then, through the power of Jesus Christ, making them go poof.  This is both exploitative and minimizing.  In the episode “Dead and Back,” for example, the client, Viki, claimed she was tormented by evil spirits.  After talking to her and doing some cursory investigation, they learn her father was abusive and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound (it’s unknown whether it was an accident or suicide).  The team and psychic Chip Coffey jump all over that and the fact that Viki had been technically dead for a few moments following an aneurysm in 1999.  The PRS crew determines a portal was opened during when Viki “died” and her father came through.  The team casts out the ghost of her father and that is that, despite Viki’s tormented plea to her father about the way he treated her.  There was no mention that perhaps Viki needed therapy to deal with the abuse she suffered far more than she needed a theatrical casting out ritual.  Instead, the episode ends with Ryan saying he hopes she can view this second chance at life as a blessing and leave her painful memories behind.  I thought that was, at best, irresponsible.
 

Obviously, Paranormal State is not meant to be a documentary series.  It is purely for entertainment purposes, which would be fine were the show actually entertaining.  Ryan delivers over-the top dialogue in an expressionless tone and I can’t hear him say “Director’s Log” without thinking “Star Date 4429.6” in my head.  It’s just that campy and eye-roll worthy.  Suspense is not built well, and I don’t find any of the episodes remotely scary, which is shocking given my susceptibility to things that go bump in the night. 
 

The picture is, for the most part, surprisingly clear, though there is plenty of the grainy, washed-out tones you’d expect from a ghost hunting show.  The production values are too good in some ways, with slick special effects and establishing shots of dark, empty, and shadowed rooms.  The audio is mostly good, again with excellent effects, but some members of the team are prone to mumbling and are difficult to hear.  For extras there are five client updates, a featurette on the gadgets used to detect supernatural phenomena, and a short behind the scenes look at what some members of the team have experienced.
 

Paranormal State fails on every level: believability, creepiness, and entertainment.  I’m all for shows about the paranormal, but they need to be interesting or at least watchable, and this one is neither.