In a speculative fiction show, does the supernatural exist as such?
Tru Calling there’s no hint why Tru is sent back in time; no sense it’s all part of something mystical. It just happens. It’s just a conceit. Buffy, on the other hand, is a Slayer, of a long line of Slayers. There’s a mythos behind it. Star Trek in its many incarnations is speculative science. It sometimes takes a while for a show to find its feet. What’s happening is usually that the writers haven’t found the show’s template, or the audience didn’t like the template and the writers are rethinking it. In Goldberg and Rabkin’s Successful Television Writing, they talk about trying to find the template for Baywatch. In the first eight episodes they tried all sorts of plots. But they didn’t really figure the show out until the eighth episode, when they got two characters trapped in an armored car in the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. It wasn’t a good episode, they say, but at least it was an episode that would not happen on someone else’s show. They realized that every episode of Baywatch had
