One of the key quirks that made the early seasons of the X-Files great was the Mulder/Scully dynamic, where he came up with these wild, plausible-sounding theories that fit the cases, but in the end, Scully won him over with logical, rational (if often still weird) explanations.

I had one idea for a series that would flip this on its head a little.

Wizard’s Wishes

A Manhattan police psychologist goes undercover to stop a wizard who is wreaking havoc across the city and buying off anyone who tries to stop him by granting wishes. Detective gets into a relationship to try to talk him down. Meanwhile, the NYPD hounds him mercilessly.

This is another of my “just a paragraph” concepts that I’ve kept kicking around. The way it would work would have been almost the opposite of X-Files. The mundane, plausible police work all leads to bonkers dead ends: money appearing from seemingly nowhere, diseases vanishing like they’d never happened, impossible accidents befalling rivals. But the real answer (hard for the “normies” to believe) would always be magic.

As fun a thought experiment as that might be, the “a wizard did it” answer will always come off as hokey. It has a better chance as a one-off episode (even an “it was all a dream” throwaway) for a cop show. Plus, throw in that I don’t particularly care for procedurals, and I’ll just pass on writing this one.