35 STEPS TO GETTING YOUR OWN PARANORMAL TV SHOW
1) Take a critical stance against popular opinion in the paranormal community. It doesn’t matter if you believe in what you’re saying. It’s not about sincerity, it’s about getting noticed. The best targets are high profile figures and the T.V shows that they appear on rather then technical aspects of paranormal investigation. You will get more publicity out of attacking a paranormal celebrity then someone’s use of an E.M.F meter.
2) Wait at least 6 months while you build up your support base. Once you have their trust and they have proven their loyalty by standing with you, it’s time to repay that trust by ripping them off. Start a crowd funding scheme to finance your “next project” knowing t
hat ultimately it involves spending their hard earned money to do the complete opposite of what they are currently supporting. Make a few vague intermittent statements about what you are doing with the funds but don’t actually produce anything to show for it.
3) Wait a couple more months then gradually shift from being critical to being neutral. Claiming neutrality will give the impression that you want to be impartial and objective about your opinions. You will start to lose support because being neutral is another word for fence-sitter, and in the paranormal field this is almost as bad as people that swap sides just to increase their popularity. The positive effects of this is that there are less people to question where their crowd funding money went or expose your hypocrisy when you finally make the “big switch.”
4) Once you have become “neutral”, keep up the pretense for a few weeks. Then you can slowly begin the transition to the other side. (But still keep pretending that you haven’t) You will lose the last of your hardcore supporters but you will still retain the more gullible ones and those that will blindly go along for the ride even if it’s over a cliff.
5) Although it may still be too early to start groveling directly to the major paranormal celebrities you once criticized, you can start with the low level ones. The type that although not that famous themselves may know someone that is. Social media is the perfect platform for this. You can start your ass-kissing from the comfort of your own armchair. But don’t forget these are not the people that you’re really interested in, it’s who they know.
6) Always remember that ethics and self-respect are far less important then fame and your ultimate objective of getting your own paranormal T.V show.
7) Next you must attempt to cover your past. You can probably rely on the fact that your new followers have learned most of their deductive reasoning from watching paranormal T.V shows meaning they aren’t clever enough to do any actual investigating. But you know that that the internet will eventually give up its ghosts and everything that implicates you will one day come back to haunt you. You hope by then that you will have your own T.V show which will mean that all criticism is automatically dismissed as jealously.
8) Remember that money you raised from crowd funding? The majority of people that donated to your campaign aren’t following you anymore and your new supporters aren’t aware of your past. But despite everything you have done so far you still have a few shreds of integrity left so you decide to put the money back into paranormal research. Some people may question how paying your cable TV bill constitutes research. But you are watching a lot of paranormal T.V shows on cable, and researching them just to make sure that when you get your own, that it’s the same formulaic balance of bullshit and brain-dead-rhetoric masquerading as entertainment. You’re finding that the strain of keeping up the façade is hard work so you decide that you need a vacation. Luckily you still have plenty of that crowd funded money left over, and checking out the Haunted Mansion at Disney World still counts as paranormal investigation. Doesn’t it?
9) You must continue to reinvent yourself, get a new name, new website, and new logo. Pretend it’s all about change, and don’t forget to make a statement about that on your new site about how it’s all about moving forward, change is progress etc etc (when it’s actually all about just hiding your tracks.) It doesn’t matter how many quotes you post that you stole off the front of an inspirational greeting card. It won’t cover up the fact that you reversed your opinions for nothing more “noble” then to try and get on T.V.
10) Continue to cultivate that friendship with that low level paranormal celebrity; he’s the key to getting to one of the “big boys”. You’re attempting to befriend a “proper” paranormal celebrity but only one that can help get you your own T.V show. So you must aim for one that wasn’t just some paranormal-puppet doing the bidding of the producers like the majority. You want someone that’s a producer or is good friends with one.
11) Important, when you do make contact with an actual paranormal celebrity don’t aim to high. It’s far easier to get to someone that used to be on paranormal T.V desperately clutching onto the last strands of fame then someone that is still on paranormal T.V.
12) At this point you will have amassed a considerable number of followers. These are followers as opposed to supporters. You want followers because you don’t want anyone that can think for themselves but who will still be easily impressed to know someone that knows someone that knows someone that used to be on a paranormal T.V show.
13) Now it’s time to give up even pretending to be neutral. You have swapped sides. But you have lost virtually all of your previous support but there will always be a few that will swap-sides with you, proving not to be loyal but just to be easily led. They will pretend that it’s because their views have changed but it’s actually because their opinions, like yours were just token ones. But remember it’s all about being popular so it’s not the quality of people that follow you, its how many.
14) Deep down you know that you are being ridiculed both by your former supporters and the paranormal celebrity’s that you once criticized but are now groveling to. But keep kidding yourself that it’s the quality of the copy-and-paste plagiarized articles that you post on your website that are getting you more likes on your Facebook page, not the second hand glory reflected upon you by your new paranormal “friend.”
15) People have seen through the smokescreen and they are bringing up your past. The pressure is getting to you so you write a defensive guilt ridden diatribe criticizing your detractors and relying on the fact that your newly acquired followers are in fact to naive to do any research as to your previous history and will in fact back you up. 
16) You now need to find more high profile ways to grovel to those para-celebs at the top of the chain. How about one of those high priced pay to ghost hunt events? You know, the ones that you used to criticize for being a rip-off. They virtually let anyone appear at those. Someone that has an internet radio show with half a dozen listeners or wrote a 50 page self published e-book on demons or you could call yourself a psychic.
17) You’ve now distanced yourself from the low level paranormal celebrity that you used as a stepping stone because with your relentless self-humiliation and apologizing for any past offence caused you have finally got to someone in the big leagues. It’s time for one last push. You rally your star-struck follower’s against anyone that criticizes paranormal T.V shows which is much easier now that they know that you know an actual paranormal celebrity. It’s important to make sure that your self-righteous rants appear to be in defense of all paranormal celebrities just in case your non-stop brown-nosing to the current one falls through. But it’s really just an act put on for your paranormal best- friend who also “happens” to be a producer.
18) You got the show.
19) Don’t forget to announce how your hard work paid off and how you couldn’t have done it without peoples support, and how you’re really showed everyone that doubted you. Showed them what? How to be an ass-kissing, suck-up? How to do a complete U-turn regarding everything you once stood for? How to sacrifice any self-respect you once had to get on paranormal T.V? Yeah, congratulations you really showed them.
20) Now what? You still have one last shot at regaining at least some of your integrity. So what do you do? Become the same people you once fought against or take a chance and actually attempt to do something groundbreaking, being a true voice for change and doing a show which is not just entertaining but honest, doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence and could undo some of the damage that the other shows have done.
21) You don’t take the chance; you stick to the formula because ultimately you’re all just talk and to afraid to even attempt anything original or groundbreaking. But that formula still works for Ghost Hunters so you just follow meekly in their well-trodden paranormal T.V footsteps.
22) After a 6 episode test run the show gets cancelled. The reality sinks in that there will never be another Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures.
23) Its very important that you blame the production company, the editors and everyone but yourself for how you were portrayed.
24) Remember that if you’re ever criticized you’re never in the wrong it’s always because people are jealous of your success. Never, EVER, because you’re at fault. (This is the number one rule of being a paranormal – celebrity.) What success are people jealous of exactly? Did you somehow confuse walking around with a flashlight in a haunted house with winning a Noble prize for your contribution to world peace?
25) Boast about how at least you got to go to ghost hunting in all these great places and someone else paid for it. (Because it was far easier to do that and humiliate yourself then make the effort to get a better job that would actually provide you with enough money to do it anyway.)
26) Milk a few months of your fast fading celebrity status at ridiculous overpriced paranormal conventions. Although by now you won’t be asked to attend any major ones where para-celebrity’s who are still on T.V are appearing. You will be at the ones with the people that used to be on paranormal T.V and like you are desperately trying to put off their increasingly imminent return to reality.
27) You have now gone completely out of fashion and your supporters who were really more interested in who was the “flavor of the month” then actual paranormal research have once again switched loyalties.
28) People love to kick other people when their down. And remember all those things you tried to cover up when you first began to chase that paranormal dream? They’ve come back to bite you. Only this time you don’t have any of your followers left to hide behind.
29) You desperately try and reinvent yourself again to fit in with the latest fad which ironically was the one that you followed originally before you sold out both yourself and your community for your chance at paranormal glory. You now realize that if you had stuck to your guns, you would have got both fame and credibility. But people are onto you now.
30) You try and get in with the new trend setters but unfortunately for you one of the key players happens to be that minor celebrity you dumped as soon as y
ou got your first foot up the ladder to paranormal fame. You may not remember him, but he remembers you and he’s not so minor anymore. But besides that, your last year’s news and he doesn’t want his brand damaged.
31) You gradually fade back into obscurity.
32) History will now judge you, not by your cancelled paranormal T.V show but as the hypocrite you became and how you are now part of the very problem that you once fought against.
33) Six months later and you are watching reruns of your show on some obscure channel at 3 am in the morning which is only on because they ran out of infomercials to fill space with.
34) A year later and you’re in the discount store where you now work and you see the first (and only season) of your show on D.V.D for a $1.00 sitting right next to the cans of baked beans and boxes of generic brand detergent.
35) Several years later you sit at home in your dingy apartment watching season 9 of the show that replaced yours. You take another sip of your beer which is now flat (much like your career in the paranormal field) and keep repeating to yourself “IT WAS ALL WORTH IT”.
Tony Hart-Wilden
Ultimate Paranormal TV List – Doubtful News
The Greatest Paranormal TV Shows – The Top Tens
Paranormal Television – Wikipedia
The Best Paranormal Television Shows – Ranker
British TVs Love Affair With The Paranormal – The Telegraph
Paranormal TV Productions – Paranormal Magazine
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