Rob Lowe finds an excuse to hang out with his college age sons by indulging his life long interest in the paranormal with “The Lowe Files” (A&E, 10 p.m.), where he gets them in a van to visit alleged haunted locales, Bigfoot tracks and the rest.
Their camaraderie, and its occasional humor, leavens what is usually deadly serious (and unconvincing) paranormal sleuthing shows.
“Part of the whole concept of the show is that it’s the journey and it’s creating memories for us and having an excuse to be together,” Lowe told reporters last week at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. “So if we don’t find actual results it’s not really all that important. And when we did find results, which we did in a couple of shows in particular they were kind of mind blowing.”
One of them happened in tonight’s premiere, a condemned former boys’ reformatory in California, where “the furniture was moving and the voices were talking and the lights went on and off.”
“What we ended up getting on camera just so far exceeded my expectations,” says son Matthew Lowe, 23. “That’s what I was most happy about.”
Lowe says his interest in this area came as a youngster.
“When I was probably eight years old, I saw probably was a Roger Corman movie, ‘Legend of Boggy Creek,’ at the drive in and it’s, like, a guy in a horrendous suit, you know, terrorizing people, and it so traumatized me that I was obsessed with Bigfoot for forever on. So to go out and do this, it’s like the 8 year old boy trapped into a 53 year old man’s body’s sort of dream.”