Weird -- or what?

Weird – or what? – The opening shot of this TV series is an immaculately groomed lawn, the arc of a driveway leading from a suburban street, a nice if nondescript home, ranch-style, like something built around 1958.  The image is like the first image in an ad for casualty insurance – you await some sort of mayhem to be visited on this idyllic scene.  Mayhem is on its way in the form of William Shatner who appears driving a Segway up the driveway between the neatly clipped hedges and banks of flowering plants.  Shatner gets off the Segway somewhat unsteadily and goes into his house, collecting a newspaper from somewhere near the front door.  Old Captain Kirk looks bloated, half-drunk, and, even, slightly disheveled.  He is wearing a polo shirt that fits way too tightly around his mid-section.  Shatner announces that the news is full of weird things, that he stays up late trying to figure them out, and that “(he) loves it.”  After this disorienting introduction, the show is off to the races.  Shatner announces the subject of this night’s episode:  unexplained phenomena of various species, solemnly intoning at the end of his intro the tag-line “It’s weird – or what?”  Throughout the show he pronounces this phrase three or four times usually to punctuate sequences devoted to the depiction and, then, explanation (or mis-explanation) of strange events.  The events are semi-staged, sometimes featuring actors annoyingly similar, but better-looking, than the poor bastards who were blown-up, hit by lightning, or possessed by demons.  Typically, the show produces three explanations for the mysterious incident – one of the explainers is a college professor, emeritus, from a pretty good school who provides a rational, scientific or psychological account of the strange episode; another explainer is someone, usually bearded with a portentous voice, who has a paranoic or conspiratorial view of the event; finally, an all-purpose and opportunistic crackpot, someone like the ubiquitous David Childress, explicates the phenomena in terms of ghosts, aliens, ancient astronauts or vortices of anti-matter distributed along ley lines.  The wacko explicator is generally merry and speaks his lines with a twinkle in his eye, daring you to disbelieve him.  Shatner provides a jocular interlude, often with bargain-basement special effects, pronouncing the whole thing too strange to be understood by mortal man and reminding us that “it’s weird or what?”  The strange events that the show features are mostly new to me – not the stale reprises of the Nazca lines, the Bermuda Triangle and Flight 61 normally featured -- and the three explications are generally quite interesting:  whoever makes this thing always includes one completely rational explanation that tends to provide a realistic account of what really happened.  I’ve looked up a number of the weird episodes featured on the show on Wikipeda and the Tv program’s account of those phenomena is generally accurate and, even, fair-minded.  The science is sometimes quite interesting and most of the explainers have some presence – the show frequently depicts them staring uneasily into the camera, usually in dimly lit rooms or in front of turbulent seascapes, a technique that Werner Herzog pioneered in which the interlocutor looks anxiously at the cameraman awaiting a signal either that the camera has been shut off or that he should start speaking.  The show is fascinating and addictive.  But it exists for one reason only:   Shatner is the star and he knows it and his bizarre gestures, his unfunny-funny half-jokes, his leering and sneering and curiously menacing presence is the strangest and most inexplicable thing in the program.  In an interlude between two hauntings, Shatner solemnly pontificates about ghosts and spirits while some guy stands behind him with a lampshade on his head – periodically a glass of bourbon scoots telekinetically across the table while Shatner rolls his eyes.  “I don’t see ghosts,” Bill says with completely a completely unintelligible expression on his face, “That is, unless I’m drunk.”  Clearly, ancient Bill is doing a variation on, and hommage to the great, late Jack Palance who spent the twilight of his career lurking around the edges of Ripley’s Believe it or Not.  But Palance was elegant, sinister, Mephistophelian – there isn’t even a name for what Shatner does.