Yes, it’s that time of season again when the TV shows start their seasons, and new shows are introduced. Paranormal Cops is A&E’s latest installment to the ghost hunting genre. Don’t get your hopes up.

I started off this morning by watching the opening episode of Paranormal Cops, and all I could think of was that it was Ghost Hunters, rebranded. Same synopsis, same investigation style, same finish. It all starts out with the Chicago Paranormal Detectives, cops by day, paranormal investigators by night (plumbers by day, investigators by night…sound familiar?). They get the call on a haunted place by a distraught employee and so they go and check it out. They listen to what the employee has to say about the occurances in the building and then they go to work, after shutting down the lights for the night. Deja’ Vu’ anyone?

The CPD starts off by running around the basement (which is the hotspot), packing the usual gear. EMF detectors, camera’s with nightvision, guns. Guns? Yeah. The one guy I saw was packing heat. I don’t know why…anyhows, they look around here and there and have their medium (not a cop) check out areas along with them. They find a spot where the EMF detector gets slightly active. Instead of trying to detect the source of the EMF, they go right to work assuming a ghost is present. They start asking questions, the detector goes off…and the medium translates…anyhows…another detective investigates the news surrounding the building which turns out to be  an old mobsters casino, owned by the driver to Al Capone. They find that that homicides have occured in the basement. After the night they find two leads that they investigate. One is a former worker in the building, who tells an eerie tale, while another happened to be a patron of the old mob casino, and of course, the guy collaborates the homicides that occured there. They return again the  next night and have long winded EMF talks (ala Ghost Hunters) with the ghost that resides there. The show finishes off with reviewing the case and the evidence with the client, and of course, rating the paranormal activity of the building on a scale of one to four. It turns up a three in the CPD book. Case closed.

Case Closed? In the opening statements of the show, it is stated ‘We don’t rest until your case is closed’. Well how do you close a paranormal investigation?

This is horrible A&E programming. They couldn’t even do something original (like Ghost Lab tried), they just took the Ghost Hunters formula and spun it into their own show. Of course they do have their own style of investigating, but realistically, it’s the same show. The only high points I could say about the show is the Cops seal the building with police seal tape (in which they found a door with broken seal later in the show), and they carry guns. I can’t wait until the show fuses into a mixture of Ghost Hunters and Cops!  The lows to this show are orbs…they like orbs.

The jury is still in session as far as this show is concerned. If you like Ghost Hunters, you should like this show, but if you really don’t like Ghost Hunters or have had enough of watching it, this show will be a waste of your time.