"Weird Science"
The show helped pioneer documentary style crime-science shows. The show's official web site says it profiles "puzzling, often baffling cases whose riddles are ultimately solved by forensic detection." The cases and people are real. Perhaps surprisingly, DNA testing is rarely focused on. While ballistics, hair analysis, and fingerprint comparisons do turn up, the show seems to prefer unusual evidence such as animal hairs, plant analysis, or arson investigation. Scientists and forensic experts in many fields are interviewed.
Not every case is a crime. In some cases, the investigation reveals that suspects are innocent, and the death was an accident or suicide. Several shows have profiled people who have been jailed for or convicted of a crime, and who were ultimately exonerated by forensic evidence.
Although Medical Detectives also showed how outbreaks of mysterious illnesses were tracked (such as the Hantavirus and Legionellosis), most of those have been dropped in favor of criminal cases (and occasionally civil cases) on TruTV.
Read more about this topic: Forensic Files
Famous quotes containing the words weird and/or science:
“Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanskrit? What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her? One moon gone by unnoticed?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking, love has found. Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short to the spirits everything speaks.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)