TV Review: Medium an enjoyable trip into the paranormal
NBC has been airing promos for Medium (10 p.m. tomorrow and Thursday) for at least a month now, but other than clueing viewers in that the series is about a woman who has visions, the spots don't give a good sense of the series.
Too bad. It's an intriguing drama with an enjoyably creepy vibe.
The first episode does a better job than the promos, but it still has a lot of the requisite set-up as married mother and law student Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) comes to accept her power to see dead people, see the future and read other people's thoughts.
An intern in the Phoenix district attorney's office, she ultimately becomes a special consultant to the district attorney (Miguel Sandoval).
Medium could be something akin to, say, Crossing Jordan, but creator Glenn Gordon Caron (Moonlighting, Now and Again) takes the series in a different direction. While there will undoubtedly always be a police case mystery that's the show's "A" story, the "B" story is really a domestic drama about Allison coming to grips with her abilities on the homefront with her engineer husband, Joe (Jake Weber), and young children.
A future episode suggests daughter Bridgette (Maria Lark) may have inherited some of her mom's abilities.
This mix of domesticity and crime stories makes Medium greater than the sum of its parts. The series has the same chilly edge as Caron's Now and Again, which also mixed homefront "B" stories with more action-oriented "A" plots.
Some of Allison's premonitions are a little too on-the-nose, but her character feels real. Kudos to Arquette for making Allison believable; she doesn't come off as a loon or an eccentric, just a woman trying to reconcile her abilities with everyday life.
The character is based on a real-life Allison DuBois, an Arizona woman who said she first experienced contact with the afterlife at age 6, when her recently deceased great-grandfather appeared to her.
"Tell no one," her father advised, so she suppressed her abilities until she was a young adult. Like the fictional DuBois, the real Allison interned as a law student before becoming a child-abduction expert and consultant for the Glendale, Arizona, police department.
Unlike the fictionalized DuBois, the real Allison never wavered in the confidence she has in her own abilities.
"Even though other people didn't understand me, I was very certain of myself and knew what I was hearing and seeing," DuBois said in a teleconference last month. "It helped to have a strong belief in who I was as a person."
Arquette acknowledged the TV version of DuBois is more self-doubting for dramatic effect, but the actress said she believes in Allison's abilities.
"I do believe in this 100 percent," she said. "I also believe 100 percent there are a lot of charlatans out there."
The real DuBois agreed. She also said she had no concerns about the dramatic license taken with the character.
"The reality is the person on screen is based on me, but it's not necessarily every day of my life, so I'm not uncomfortable with it at all," she said. The real DuBois acts as a consultant on the series, answering questions about her abilities and how they work and discussing the cases she's worked on but changing enough specific elements to protect the confidentiality of the families involved.
Arquette said she was attracted to the show because of its depiction of DuBois' home life.
"I love the marriage relationship because they keep each other honest and enjoy each other's sense of humor," Arquette said. "It's a sexy but boring relationship. It's a good formula to watch to figure out how to have a successful marriage because they are good parents and want to be good parents. I don't want to do a procedural show per se."
As for the future of Medium, DuBois said her psychic abilities indicate it stands a good chance of succeeding.
"Whether or not the show is going to go [the distance]?" she said. "Yes, it is."