Supernatural Realism

[jarandhel]

So, on a whim (and because it's available on Hulu) I started re-watching an old show that I enjoyed from time to time when I was younger.  Poltergeist: The Legacy.  According to Hulu, it originally aired in 1996, though that seems wrong to me somehow... I could have sworn it was a contemporary of Friday the Thirteenth the TV series which began its run roughly a decade earlier.  At any rate, I've been very pleasantly surprised to find a fairly high level of magic realism in this series.  There are some elements that are original, pulled in to flesh out their fictional world, but the elements taken from existing myth are very well researched.  It's also far more of a drama than most other supernatural series... while there are some combat scenes, things are rarely resolved at the end of one's fists in the series.  I'm really enjoying watching it again, and I'm surprised by how much substance there was that I've forgotten over the years. 

Comments

[downtide]

I remember Poltergeist and I'm certain that it wasn't running until the 1990s. That was a great series.

[jarandhel]

Really? I'm thinking about it, and I could have sworn I wasn't in high school already when it aired. I graduated in June 1999, so I would have been a sophmore when it premiered if it really premiered in 1996. That doesn't seem right...

[downtide]

But I remember watching it in the house I live in now, not the house I lived in in the 80s.

Unless it aired in the US 5-10 years before it came to the UK, which would have been pretty unusual even then. We tended to get shows a few months behind you guys, but not years behind.

IMDB and the main fan site both say 1996-1999.

[jarandhel]

Huh... weird. That means it came out just a year before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series, and I wouldn't have watched it right when it came out since I didn't have cable... I would have had to wait for it to be syndicated. That *really* feels off... not just in terms of my personal timeline, but in terms of the feel of the show itself, it feels like an old 80s-style show.

*wonders if I hopped dimensions again when I wasn't looking... it's hamster/hampster all over again* ;-)