‘Real’ Psychics Have No Place on ‘Real’ Crime Shows

Today, I talk about how stupid it is to have “real” psychics appear on crime shows.

This is Disgrace Distract and Bother Me, a feature where I just point out minor things that annoy me in pop culture. Basically, think of it like the lowest level of criticism, then Remember to Forget is the middle, where it’s like, “Okay, this is bad, but not, like, offensively bad” and finally, Things That Turned Out Bad is for, “This is seriously messed up.”

Psychics helping out on criminal cases is a totally cool plot device for cop shows, as while psychics helping out cops doesn’t come up THAT often in real life, it comes up enough that I think that it is fair game for a plot on a TV cop show. But here’s the thing, though, I think it is reasonable enough to play a “Who knows, maybe psychics are real?” card on a TV show, even though the much better approach is to treat them as not real (since there is no such thing as having super psychic powers), like this excellent episode of Cagney and Lacey that dealt with the problem of having a psychic mess with their very high profile case…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTtsGy6cE

So that’s fair game.

However, Blue Bloods has decided to go a WHOLE other direction.

In Season 9, they introduced Callie Thorne as Maggie, a psychic.

Callie Thorne is an excellent actress and she and Donnie Wahlberg’s Detective Danny Reagan have unmistakable chemistry with each other. Here they are goofing around in a candid behind-the-camera shot on Thorne’s Twitter account…

https://twitter.com/calliopethorne/status/1116728448922341376

The problem is that in Season 12’s premiere, Maggie is just outright a REAL psychic. She has outright superpowers. She took a sock from a dead kid and literally deduced that the killer was the biological father of the dead kid.

So yes, in the Blue Bloods universe, people have superpowers. Awesome.

What sucks is that Thorne is such a good actor that I really would like to see her around as a love interest for Danny, except for the whole, you know, superpowers plot on a “realistic” crime drama.

Blech.

Shows like Blue Bloods are meant to come as close to our world as possible, and that verisimilitude is ruined with stuff like having a character with superpowers.

Do not like.