TV PARTY: DOOMED OCCULT DETECTIVES

For a brief, beautiful period in the ’60s and ’70s, television kept trying to invent the guy you called when the police couldn’t help. Ghost hunters, psychic investigators, demonologists, and occult experts armed with ancient books, skeptical assistants and suspiciously helpful police contacts, they were built to spend every week cracking another impossible case. Before KOLCHAK went chasing monsters through the night and long before THE X-FILES put the paranormal on the federal payroll, these would-be series were already trying to turn the venerable occult detective of weird fiction into a weekly television hero. Networks commissioned the pilots, watched them…and repeatedly decided there would be no Episode Two.

TV PARTY exhumes two of the best surviving specimens: a mystery double feature of orphaned pilots from series that never existed, each introducing a brand-new supernatural sleuth and sending him straight into his first—and last—case. Expect haunted houses, impossible murders, forbidden artifacts, black magic and two tantalizing glimpses of the horror shows television almost gave us. No titles until showtime. The networks buried them. We’re putting them back on the air.