Television: Spirits of the Age

Most people who come to Allison DuBois are trying to reach the souls of the dead. Paramount Television came to her to find living viewers. DuBois, a Phoenix, Ariz., psychic who lends her services to crime investigations, had earlier worked with Paramount on an unsuccessful reality pilot, Oracles, in which a panel of five seers gave readings to a studio audience. In 2003, the company asked if it could base a drama series on her, to be overseen by Glenn Gordon Caron of Moonlighting fame. The creator of a romantic private-eye series may not have seemed the natural choice to produce a creepy show about death and afterlife, but, DuBois says, "he really got the spirit--excuse the pun--of my work."

Medium (NBC, Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.), starring Patricia Arquette as the fictionalized DuBois, debuted last month with more than 16 million viewers. Given her vocation, DuBois might have seen the show's success coming, but TV history suggested the series didn't stand a ghost of a chance. (Hey, she started it!) Since the launches of Twin Peaks and The X-Files, the network schedules have been littered with failed attempts at spooky, paranormal series: Millennium, The Others, Miracles, Wolf Lake and more. (The exceptions, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joan of Arcadia and HBO's Carnivale, have been cult hits or cable shows.) Viewers, meanwhile, gravitated to reality shows and firmly realistic cop procedurals.

But this season, with the Top 10 debut of ABC's eerie Lost, there are signs that viewers are ready for less naturalism and more supernaturalism. Fox recently debuted Point Pleasant (Thursdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), a self-serious horror soap in which a young woman in a New Jersey resort town turns out to be the daughter of Satan. Says Pleasant executive producer and Buffy alumna Marti Noxon: The networks are discovering that "there are certain things that you can't do in reality shows."

Noxon is right: the closest thing reality TV has given us to a female Antichrist is Paris Hilton. But a supernatural angle can also offer new twists on played-out drama formats. For Caron, an admitted skeptic about psychics, the attraction of Medium was writing about a woman whose gift separates her from other people--as opposed to producing TV's umpteenth cop series. "There are more than enough crime shows, and I had no interest in being the next one," says Caron.

That's just as well, because Medium is not a very good crime show. Its grisly murder tales out of the CSI playbook are average at best. Medium distinguishes itself as a character study: Allison is still learning to trust her own abilities and handle the responsibility they impose, and Arquette portrays her with a refreshing mundanity. "Allison's not a cop," Arquette says. "She's a housewife. It's that conflict that interests me: trying to be a good mother while at the same time dealing with the dead guy sitting at the kitchen table." The contrast plays out in Allison's gently sparring relationship with her husband Joe (Jake Weber), an engineer. As a scientist, he offers a skeptical counterpoint to her intuitions; as a husband, he deals with such problems as how to throw a surprise party for a wife who can read minds. Their marriage is intellectual, head butting and loving--part Mulder and Scully, part David and Maddie, part Darren and Samantha.