Emily Rose, right, plays FBI agent Audrey Parker in Haven. Jason Priestly co-stars.

Syfy’s supernatural series Haven will blend Twitter into the onscreen action Friday with the launch of a seven-episode subplot involving social networking newbies who get sucked into a series of weird messages from an anonymous troublemaker.

While hero FBI agent Audrey Parker (played by Emily Rose) tackles various cases of hocus pocus in New England, small-town newspaper editors Vince (Richard Donat) and Dave (John Dunsworth) impulsively set up Twitter accounts as @VinceHaven and @DaveHaven.

What starts out as a typical quest for more Twitter followers becomes a more serious matter when mysterious tweet stalker @ColdInHaven gets involved. The anonymous Twit will be revealed during Haven’s Sept. 30 season finale.

Syfy Digital General Manager Craig Engler told Wired.com that Haven producers took a low-key approach by integrating Twitter activity as a backdrop to the show’s front-burner storylines.

“We don’t want it to be like, ‘Oh Vince and Dave are going to sit down during the show and have a Twitter conversation!’ because it’s boring to watch people tweet,” he said.

‘It’s boring to watch people tweet.’

Instead, Engler said, “You’ll see them [tweeting] in the background or hear snippets of conversation. We’re going to kind of tease the Twitter storyline throughout the episodes without directly engaging it.”

Haven is hardly the first TV show to feature Twitter tie-ins during prime time. HBO’s vampire series True Blood, for example, posts tweets by Anna Paquin’s lead character, Sookie Stackhouse (@sookie_bt). And Fringe stars Joshua Jackson and John Noble live-tweeted wisecracks during a repeat telecast of the sci-fi series’ Season 1 finale.

However, microblogging rarely gets woven so intricately into the on-screen storyline, according to Twitter media partnerships manager Robin Sloan. “This Haven storyline … incorporates Twitter more deeply into the show’s plot than anything we’ve ever seen before,” Sloan said in a statement.

If the character tweets crafted by Haven staff writers draw a crowd — each Haven “editor” already has about 1,300 followers — Engler said he believes more TV shows will follow suit.

“Twitter is going to track Haven for us as a case study,” he said. “I don’t think everyone’s going to rush out and integrate Twitter into their shows, but in this case it makes sense and might pave the way a little bit for other people to experiment.”

Haven airs Fridays at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Syfy.

Haven newspaper editors Vince (played by Richard Donat, left) and Dave (John Dunsworth) set up Twitter accounts in an upcoming story arc.
Images courtesy Syfy