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EARLY REVIEW: Zachary Quinto's "In Search Of" Is a Lightweight Reboot for the Reality TV Era

6/27/2018

18 Comments

 
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​Reboots are the biggest trend in entertainment right now, with a mixed bag of results. In Search Of is a program conceived in sin, so to speak, tainted by the elements of its own DNA. Ages and ages ago, a German film adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods was nominated for an Oscar, and TV producer Alan Landsburg and Twilight Zone host Rod Serling recut it for American television in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. The special attracted 28 million viewers on NBC and spawned 250,000 news sales of Chariots in the first 48 hours after broadcast, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. It was the most successful ancient astronaut TV broadcast ever. After a series of such specials promoting credulous views of UFOs and ancient astronauts, Landsburg decided to produce an ongoing syndicated series to be hosted by Serling as a spinoff from the specials. Serling died before the show went to air, and Leonard Nimoy stepped in as the host of In Search Of… which aired from 1977 to 1982. The new series spread beyond ancient astronauts to cover the full range of subjects generally classified as “mysterious,” from cryptozoology to UFOs, from Hitler to Nostradamus, and from poltergeists to Atlantis.
​In 2009, the History Channel adapted Chariots of the Gods anew as a two-hour special called Ancient Aliens. From the success of that special, and a subsequent test series of two-hour specials, History commissioned a sequel, first known as Ancient Aliens: The Series and then Ancient Aliens, which has aired continuously since 2010, delivering more episodes than In Search Of…’s 146-episode run and a consistent audience of around two million viewers. Unable, however, to find a successful companion series to attract similar ratings, the network has now turned to the original Chariots spinoff in the hope of recapturing the magic of the old show, which the History Channel and its sister network A&E had spent much of the 1990s and 2000s airing in reruns.
 
In short, the new In Search Of (without the ellipses) is twice the bastard offspring of Chariots of the Gods, which seems to mean that it is the product of a weird incest that makes the book both its grandfather and its cousin. Naturally, the episode made available to critics for preview is about aliens.
 
The new series is hosted by Hollywood actor Zachary Quinto, who played Mr. Spock, a role originated by Leonard Nimoy, in the J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboots, taking over the role from Leonard Nimoy. He again fills Nimoy’s shoes in serving as the host of In Search Of, though here the shoes are size too big.
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Zachary Quinto in promotional photography for “In Search Of.” Photo: An Rong Xu for the History Channel © 2018.
Last year the producers of In Search Of invited me to appear on an upcoming show about Atlantis, but I declined their offer because it would have required me to travel to Africa to stand next to Quinto, and I was not able to make the journey halfway around the world for one day’s work.
 
Quinto’s version of In Search Of opens with a disclaimer stating that experiments depicted on the show should not be attempted at home. This is a startlingly different opening than the original, which bluntly admitted (to protect its affiliate broadcast stations in the era of the Fairness Doctrine) that the series was “based on theory and conjecture” and that it offered only “possible explanations but not necessarily the only ones.” The new version dispenses with even this fig leaf. There will be very little warning that the controversial topics discussed have other explanations than those suggested here. While scientists appear on the show, no skeptical viewpoints made it to air.
 
The show has beautiful establishing shots of monuments and natural wonders, though the best shots appear to be stock footage. (I viewed this on a screener, and some stock shots may be replaced before the show airs.) The rest of the videography is competent but no different than your average cable documentary, though more dramatically lit. The score seems to have been composed for the series rather than taken off the shelf. The production values seem to be a few degrees higher than those of most comparable shows about paranormal mysteries, such as Ancient Aliens, but the show also seems a bit overproduced. The graphics are beautiful but distracting, particularly when they intrude around the edges of photographs, making them difficult to see. I also disliked the blurring used around the edges, which again compromised visibility and legibility. The music is suitably eerie but never stops, and it detracts from the spoken words. (The final sound mix may be different than my screener, and to be fair, the original In Search Of was rather saturated with synthesized ’70s sounds.) The lighting crew must have purchased blue gels in bulk because every scene is bathed in a silvery-blue light that lends an unearthly hue to the proceedings, but which calls attention to the artificiality of the program. There is a good deal of TV fakery involved, including cutaways to fake “top secret” documents that have been stamped “TOP SECRET” in absurd ways. They are clearly props, and unnecessary.
 
Quinto’s voiceover narration seems to be aiming to echo that of Nimoy, to a sometimes uncanny degree. He modulates his voice to the steady monotone and elongated vowels Nimoy used in the original, quite different from Quinto’s unscripted speaking voice, and I will confess that I found it a bit distracting, particularly since that style of narration—the so-called “voice of God”—is several decades out of date. Oddly, the affectation emulating Nimoy declines as the program progresses, and it seems almost as though it were an intentional choice given Quinto’s connection to Nimoy. The writing of the show, however, lacks the fluidity and humanity that Nimoy and his writers offered. There is no poetry here, only a workmanlike prose. Even Ancient Aliens can occasionally muster poetry.
 
But where Quinto differs most from Nimoy is that the modern version of In Search Of is explicitly framed around Quinto and Quinto’s self-described personal quest to investigate the supernatural. Quinto is on screen nearly the whole time and is the focal point of the show. At regular intervals, Quinto talks to an unseen producer in candid asides and unscripted discussion, as though this were a confessional from Real Housewives of Outer Space. While Nimoy did standups and spoke directly to camera in his series (and, memorably, participated more fully in episodes of special interest to him), those episodes were framed in documentary style rather than in reality-show format.
 
The show opens with a scattershot discussion of various branches of what we might loosely term ufology, including alien abduction, the ancient astronaut theory, government investigations of UFOs, and conspiracy theories. Naturally, a news peg tying the investigation to last year’s New York Times story about the Pentagon’s UFO program serves to make the topic relevant. The first segment sees Quinto interview a man, Kyle Bond, who claims to have experienced an alien abduction in childhood that changed his life. The show gives the man a polygraph test, which is worthless on two levels. First, polygraph tests are scientifically invalid, and, second, even if they had merit, they could only tell us whether Bond believed he had been abducted by aliens.
 
Quinto also visited SETI to discuss the scientific search for alien radio signals. Various men talk with Quinto about how the Green Bank, West Virginia telescope works and what they hope to find, but the swelling dramatic music can’t quite overcome the fact that the hourlong show delivers information more slowly, and less of it, than the original In Search Of did in its half-hour format. Reader, I was bored. If it were not for the In Search Of brand name, this program would be interchangeable with any other cable TV documentary series. It is less fun than Expedition Unknown, less rich in information than Ancient Aliens (!), and way too enamored of its star.
 
Later, Quinto talks to a chemist, Steve Colbern, who claims to have analyzed his own extraterrestrial implant, which he extracted from his own toe. He tells Quinto that the implant was made of meteoric iron, and he alleges that the scrap of metal was a “device” that had attached to his nerves to monitor his brainwaves and transmit radio waves to space aliens. Quinto brings the remains of the implant to an independent lab for reanalysis. The independent laboratory determined that the implant contained no unearthly material and was probably just a splinter Colbern stepped on. The “experiencer” disagreed and alleged that the splinter was giving off radio signals. Quinto called the results “inconclusive.” The show does not inform viewers that Colbern is a regular on the UFO talk show and lecture circuit.
 
Quinto also interviews Dough Vakoch, who is sending radio signals to the stars in the hope that an alien will hear them, and we hear from David Brin of SETI that the staff at SETI are angry with Vakoch because his work might bring dangerous aliens to Earth.
 
Another abductee gets interviewed, and Quinto then reenacts an alien abduction with a harness and a blindfold so he can “feel” what it’s like to be lifted in a tractor beam. This segment is silly, and there is an improbable assumption that the “feelings” that “experiencers” claim to have experienced are, in fact, what really happened. The show might have done well to have a psychologist or other scientist on hand to note that these “feelings” are similar to those of sleep paralysis and dream states in the moments surrounding falling asleep or waking.
 
It is useful to compare this episode of the new In Search Of to the first episode of the original show’s third season, “UFO Captives,” which covered the same material, namely people who believe they were abducted by aliens, right down to the use of a lie detector to validate their claims. The difference in tone is immediately apparent, as is the original show’s focus on the abductees rather than the host. The original show is humane, interested in the human side of the story. It is elegant and eloquent, even though it is clearly biased in favor of the weird and wild. Alan Landsburg knew how to make audiences care about the people involved, regardless of whether the audience shared their belief in UFOs and abductions. The new series is slick but cold. It doesn’t care about the people it processes, only how to package them into a product. Its focus is on Zachary Quinto, whose personal journey we are supposed to identify with, presumably because he is a celebrity. 
 
“Science is far from conclusive,” Quinto intones ominously near the end. This may have been a mission statement for every version of In Search Of, but here it sounds less like a call to adventure and more like a threat. By the time the show ended, I felt like it was a weightless trifle. It contained very little information, an unfortunate credulity, and a fixation on its host above its guests or its subject.
 
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In Search Of (1 hour) debuts July 20 at 10 PM ET / 9 CT on the History Channel following the 9 PM return of Ancient Aliens from its summer hiatus.
18 Comments
Mark from Bismarck
6/27/2018 09:16:29 pm

Thank you for the review. Reading it made me wonder what kind of a show you (or anyone else here) would make if The History Channel would have hired you (yeah I know) to produce and host this. Would you go all total skeptic? I'm trying to imagine you in charge, and how you would go about making it entertaining, and yet informative.

Serious question, since while I am curious about all things mysterious, I have no idea as to how I would approach such topics while trying to both make a profit and keep it classy.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/27/2018 10:28:19 pm

That's a great question, and a difficult one because my scientific interest and my interest in broadcasting are in a bit of conflict here since TV is a medium that works in emotion, not logic. The argument is less important than the presentation.

The way I would approach the topic, though, is in the manner of a classic mystery--think of Agatha Christie novels or Sherlock Holmes stories. You set up the mystery, introduce the various characters involved, and gradually reveal inconsistencies and new pieces of evidence until the solution becomes both inevitable and surprising. In the case of aliens or Atlantis, there is a great deal of history that can flesh out the modern claims and provide this sense of gradually building tension and layered revelation until the truth becomes an entertaining solution because the mystery itself has become the story rather than the bonkers claims made about it.

To do so, however, requires something cable TV can't do, because its producers work too fast and don't have the expertise to know their subject well enough. You actually have to have a point of view and a conclusion. To put together the show, you have to do like Christie did and start with the solution and work backward to set up the entire story to support that conclusion. Most cable shows don't have firm conclusions because they don't actually have facts, so their shows became grab bags of loosely related material that never quite come together coherently. Having an expert in charge would give a show a strong perspective and make it possible to build a compelling mystery story to a surprising but inevitable--and truthful!--conclusion.

Reply
Mark From Bismarck
6/27/2018 11:35:55 pm

So kind of a "Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction" scenario? I like it. Make it so! Also, as a fan of both Christie and Conan Doyle, I enjoyed your concept.

If The History Channel wants to increase their viewership, this may be just the ticket it needs, as I think their current format is getting stale, even to their die-hard viewers. I would think (hope) that even the most fervent UFO enthusiasts would welcome a bit of variety by now, or at least a challenge to their beliefs, if only to keep their brains from stagnating.

Keep the beautiful photography, introduce some compelling strange things that are true (the world is full of such things), present it as you describe, and the viewers would be interested.

Does anyone with any influence at The History Channel read this blog?

Frank
6/28/2018 03:13:04 am

A winning itinerary, Jason.

Last year the producers of In Search Of invited me to appear on an upcoming show about Atlantis,

In the case of aliens or Atlantis, there is a great deal of history that can flesh out the modern claims and provide this sense of gradually building tension and layered revelation until the truth becomes an entertaining solution....
You actually have to have a point of view and a conclusion. To put together the show, you have to do like Christie did and start with the solution and work backward to set up the entire story to support that conclusion.

The producers regarded you as an expert on Atlantis. UFOs in Plato's Atlantis are nowhere to be found, and not even remotely hinted at. Unless the mythological gods in the story are to be regarded as aliens. And you obviously have a long history in declaring to be a skeptic, and have been making it clear that there are no facts/evidence either for UFOs or Atlantis worth speaking about.

Therefore I fail to see what truth/solution you would start with, and from there work backwards to support the conclusion. If your point of view and conclusion is what you advocate on your forum, then I fail to see how it would be to the interest of the producers of the show, and their ultimate intent on enlarging their usual naive audience, which are already convinced on the actual historical existence of both UFOs and of a once existing Atlantis doted with modern-like technological knowledge.

Would not the producers actually have wanted you for the Atlantis episode as a skeptic? Perhaps they were going to stage you as a source of skepticism so as to not seem overly biased. But only to eventually discredit or render your skeptical views ineffective, which they would have edited so as to score points for their views on the reality of UFOs and their Atlantis. In other words, they were intending to use you, either by buying you with money, or/and TV notoriety.

Still, Jason, it would be interesting to your audience if you could find the time to write an essay, simulating a screenplay that would have been used on this approach you would take, if you were writing the episode, starting from the conclusion and working it backwards. And would not your conclusion to start with be that, neither UFO's or Atlantis have ever been on earth?

Jason Colavito link
6/28/2018 06:50:52 am

Frank, each episode of "In Search Of" is on a different topic, so the Atlantis episode has nothing to do with UFOs. When I say you work backward from the conclusion, I didn't mean that the show starts with the conclusion. I meant that when you write the show, you need to know what you're building toward.

Joe Scales
6/28/2018 10:10:23 am

"The way I would approach the topic, though, is in the manner of a classic mystery--think of Agatha Christie novels or Sherlock Holmes stories. You set up the mystery, introduce the various characters involved, and gradually reveal inconsistencies and new pieces of evidence until the solution becomes both inevitable and surprising."

A classic mystery, or NBC's Dateline?

Machala
6/28/2018 12:11:24 pm

Jason,
Great classic locked-room mystery writers like John Dickson Carr started with the unsolvable enigma and skillfully pealed back the layers of the literary onion to reveal the solution. This could work in presenting mysteries of myth and speculative science.

If you end up with what you obviously believe, is clear-cut evidence that X isn't really X but is instead Y, then you've properly debunked a myth or fraud. Great investigative work by a skeptic but lousy television production for History Channel's demographic.

Considering HC's viewer demographic - worldwide - you'd be better off emulating a trial lawyer than a mystery writer. I'd suggest that you lay out all your evidence, attempt to disprove the opposing sides theories and discredit their witnesses, then do your summation to the jury at the end of the show. THEN, let the jury ( audience ) decide. Have them call in or Like on Facebook, or text their vote, whether ( for example ) your views on the non-existence of Atlanta is more credible than the fantasists who believe it does. The last few minutes of the show could have be showing the vote tabulations until at the end of the show.
This kind of gimmick might even build History Channel's abysmal ratings.

Joe Scales
6/28/2018 01:17:58 pm

I don't know if I would call History Channel's ratings abysmal. For cable they can do quite well, especially with such shows like Curse of Oak Island which can lead the entire night in cable ratings. Of course if they went back to attempting actual historic programming, their ratings would suffer for it. But a competing network ought to take on the Oak Island phenomenon and air a mini-series debunking all aspects of the hoax/fraud over the years, including the current manipulators the Lagina brothers. That would attract viewers, and should it be profitable, then debunking could become a regular theme with other schemes taken on accordingly.

Machala
6/28/2018 02:00:16 pm

Joe Scales,
My Freudian slip was showing. I meant to write abysmal *reputation* NOT "ratings".
. Nowadays, one builds ratings by producing: "Crap for the Masses, 'cause the Masses are Asses " to quote an artist friend of mine.

E.T. Grondine
6/28/2018 04:15:33 pm

Machala! FOCUS! You didn't mention the Plungers or the Theosophists so everything you said is flawed. I would coach you on your writing but I am working on my next important book. I would have more time but the damn Grenadine people stole our family recipe and no one believes I'm an Indian. So many irons in the fire.

Bustenteuffel
6/28/2018 04:20:47 pm

Guy with the 1990s Atlantis website:

Hier sind wir in Amerika, nicht Deutschland. Hir benutzen wir die "quote marks". Also:

"Last year the producers..."

nicht

Last year the producers...

Joe Scales
6/28/2018 08:26:16 pm

"Nowadays, one builds ratings by producing: "Crap for the Masses, 'cause the Masses are Asses " to quote an artist friend of mine."

Probably a complaint inspired by economics. Lots of artists have it in for the masses.

Machala
6/28/2018 09:54:40 pm

Joe Scales,
No, my "Masses are Asses" quote came from a late friend of mine who was an extremely successful artist but considered most of her own work to be too "commercial". She had a genuine disdain for art critics, galleries, and astonishingly, the clients who bought her works. She always said she made too much money, in spite of herself.She used to say: "¡Siempre trato de morder la mano que me alimenta ! " ( I always try to bite the hand that feeds me ! )

Michigan State University
6/28/2018 11:45:34 am

"I'm Chris Hansen. Why don't you have a seat right there?"

Reply
Bezalel
6/30/2018 10:03:21 pm

Chris Haaaaaaaannnsen

Reply
M
8/18/2018 02:17:37 am

Show is terrible and host is even more so.

Reply
James Bressi
8/18/2018 04:16:36 pm

Regarding the "Time Slip" documentary I watched this past Friday with Zak Quinto. I think the series is great. But Zak does not know what he stumbled on in this one:

My experience:
1. Playing Quarterback for Wooster College in 1973, I went back to pass and suddenly all sound vanished and I and the rest of the world was in slow motion. I laughed to myself saying, "Did someone dose me in the water bottle?" I knew I was going to throw a pass and was not even looking and again I laughed saying to myself, "You're nuts you have no idea where you are throwing this ball!", yet I threw it. The ball sailed in slow motion, and I saw it was not my best spiral I watched in awe as it traveled in front of the multicolored clothes of the 2000 full house stadium and I marveled how beautiful this scene was, and then "Boom" time snapped back to "normal time" ( I now know to say "Whatever that is!" and my receiver catches this ball that I threaded in true "Hail Mary" fashion between 5 defenders catching it in the end zone, Touchdown! And the cheers erupted like a sonic boom as I came back into the time flow I started in before I went back to pass.


Zak: Here is my point: And this shows Francis of Assisi got it right by saying, " What you are looking for is where you are looking from." Zak, time is just a convenient guideline we accept most of us subconsciously in order to have sense of the patterns of thoughts that we crystallize into our creation of our world with our imagination. Mankind is dreaming and riding on the outflow wave of its creationary flows of thoughts that become "real" because we accept belief of them. There is no travel except with mind. When you reverse the flow back to where you are looking ( thought creating and believing from) time changes and you reach a point where it no longer has to be an accepted belief, and you find you are in the eternal Now, and that your personal self is rooted, in fact, at One with the universal Oneness of Beingness and you are the Nexus ( another Star Trek episode) Being in charge of your reality of which the many others who make up the Elohim have variable penetrance into your drama and you in theirs, everything you experience in the sensor phenomenal world you recruited to assist you in awakening from this dream. Religions were not historical based, but allegorical, Jesus, Yahweh, Buddah, Mohammed, Jehova, Zeus etc. were merely symbols for the universally individualized expression of the one beingness that forms the screen our dramas are played upon and time is imposed in to give you a rational stepping stone to your discovery of who and what you are. I have had many others but I need not tell them because it does nothing. The key to finding "Jericho, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mecca, Heaven" all allegorical symbols for the awakened God Self Nexus Consciousness is through the name, and mantra "I Am", symbolized as OM, Aum, Amen etc. The Person, the individual is just as important as the Universal, two sides of one coin and the God Self is the fusion of that. The Universal can only be reached through the individual personal, "The Prodical Son" allegory.

You were correct Time is fluid, much more than you know, but it is needed for you to anchor your accruing knowledge/experience to awakening on a platform you can understand. This is a little gifty for you and your viewers, " The secretary will disavow any knowledge of this conversation, Mr. Quinto if asked." Carry on with your quest, but know it must be in the end a uniquely personal one to you and to every ONE else, Elohim, the many in the One the One in the many You are and always have been what you are looking for. Where are you looking from right now? Do you know? You are beginning to grasp it, carry on, and good luck.


Someone allegedly named Jim but is not.

Reply
Time Slip
8/21/2018 02:09:16 pm

I recently watched the episode on Time. I appreciate Zac jumping from an airplane [This I won't do, two things fall from the sky, fools and bird poop] for his experiment on brain function and heighten memory with increased adrenalin. I once experienced a time perception phenomenon. Back in the early 70's myself and 3 close friends, all VERY good foosball players, were playing teams on the Foosball table after dropping Gray Microdot. It seems it was very difficult to score because we all seen the ball slowly rolling and making shots and blocking shots was so easy. We played for a long time before finally completing a game. With the game over I noticed a big crowd of spectators all standing around the table in awe. To us the players, the game was so slow, ball slowly rolling from one end of the table to the other end. A spectator told be the action was so incredibly fast they rarely could see the ball it moved so fast. So did our perception of time slow down to a crawl with super heighten sensory function?

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