The makers of commercial popular culture often incorporate folklore into their works. Although their definition of folklore is generally restricted to pre-modern narratives and beliefs that form only a small part of what folklore is, their works relate to traditional content in a more expansive way. This dissertation examines a contemporary television genre that not only incorporates traditional content but, I argue, functions as folklore in its own right by negotiating truth and belief, constructing social Others, and, at the meta-level, constituting an archive. Since the 1990s, serial narratives in which everyday people investigate and solve supernatural disturbances in a procedural format have become a mainstay of North American television and streaming media. Such programs, including The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have generally lacked a cohesive genre designation. I argue for “supernatural procedural” as the genre’s preferred term and trace its history from predecessors in Victorian-era occult detective fiction to early forms in 1970s television, through solidification in the 1990s into its current permutations. I outline conventions that include, among others, realistic worldbuilding, a blend of episodic and serial storytelling, and, notably, a tendency to engage with folklore. Employing an approach blending folkloristics and popular culture studies, I argue that specific characteristics of the supernatural procedural allow series to function as televisual folklore: folklore not just adapted by, but actually occurring within the television medium. This emphasis contributes to newer avenues in folklore studies, which has only recently begun seriously analyzing television, and popular culture studies, where folkloristic perspectives are often overlooked.This work considers the abovementioned series at length alongside subsequent programs like Supernatural and Grimm, using supporting analysis from Lucifer, Evil, SurrealEstate, and Wellington Paranormal, among others. Chapter 1 defines the genre’s parameters and discusses the scholarly relationship between folklore and popular culture. Chapter 2 considers how rhetorics of truth, reflexivity, and shifting dynamics of belief, skepticism, and knowledge have consequences for the shape reality takes both on and offscreen, negotiating both the boundaries of the storyworld and attitudes toward supernatural traditions. Chapter 3 explores how supernatural procedurals engage with and contribute to traditionalized narratives of violence by repeating monstrous stereotypes for cultural Others and structural formulas derived from police procedurals, the fantasy genre, fairy tales, and legends. Chapter 4 discusses how the parallel actions of knowledge production, documentation, and research by series’ authors, characters, and fans replicate outdated attitudes about folklore and mirror collection endeavors in the early stages of folkloristics. Each chapter examines how televisual constructs interweave with folkloric concerns and explores how supernatural procedurals respond to their contemporary contexts, touching on issues from police violence and conspiracy theories to fears about digital technology. By interweaving analysis of the series themselves with consideration of the traditional content that informs them, the transmedia works released in tandem with their production, and their translation after airing into works like comics and fan wikis, I demonstrate how supernatural procedurals, like folklore more broadly, act as flexible content that regularly crosses boundaries of media and authorship.