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Medium
starring Patricia Arquette
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Beyond Classification
“Medium”
starring Patricia Arquette
Butler’s theory of television can be neatly summarized by a quotation from an English wit: “TV is not to watch, it is to appear on.”
Think about it. The typical American Internet user is online three hours a day. If you’ve got a desk job, odds are that you’re glued to a computer screen about ten hours a day. And when that long workday is over, you want to go home and look at….another screen?
Why? Because “the average American” watches six hours of TV a day and you don’t feel you’re doing your share? Because you can’t think of anything else to do? Because you’re brain-dead and lazy?
Or maybe — just maybe — because there’s Good Stuff on TV. Better stuff, in fact, than you find at the movies these days. Or in books.
Butler did not have a TV for about twenty years. Then there was a World Series that seemed compelling, so a nine-inch screen came into the house. Later, there were children. The tiny black-and-white TV became a seventeen inch color set. Decades went by. The children grew up. Then came a new marriage and a child. Babysitting costs had increased dramatically. Cheaper to invest in a new TV. And thus began the addiction to “Law & Order.”
Butler and the Mrs. watch three “Law & Orders” a week, plus four late-night “Daily Shows” (when Jon Stewart deigns to show up) and “Real Time” with Bill Maher and Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” when they’re in season. And, of course, Topic [A] with Tina Brown , which Butler works on but would watch on Sunday nights even if he didn’t.
That feels like a full TV diet. The last thing on Butler’s mind: adding more “must see” TV.
Then came “Medium.”
It wasn’t the premise — married mother of three can see dead people in her dreams and predict the future, which makes her a valuable asset to the District Attorney — that grabbed Butler.
It was the people.
Patricia Arquette (“Allison DuBois”) doesn’t keep the tidiest of houses. She wears unfashionable pant suits. From most angles, it looks as if she’s carrying ten extra pounds, a souvenir from the birth of her last child.
But she’s got a rock-solid marriage to the kind of hunk you never see on TV. Jake Weber (“Joe DuBois”) is English-born and floppy-haired and an aerospace engineer. Yes, it is gratifying that he comes to believe his wife really has a psychic gift. It is far more gratifying, however, that he is verbal, wry and smart — and that he cherishes the same qualities in her. Oh, yes, and he’s hot for her; you’re never unaware that these are flesh-and-blood people who may wear t-shirts to bed, but often wake up in the middle of the night to rip them off and pillage one another.
“Medium” is compelling because it runs on two tracks — that particular week’s case and the marriage. This week, for example, while Allison was reinvestigating an apparent suicide, she was also telling Joe that his office mate was going to die. Most viewers may have been attracted to the psychic process at work in the legal case; Butler’s a sucker for the interplay between the spouses. After all, if she’s psychic, she may have something to teach us about this most mysterious of relationships.
“Medium,” is turns out, is based on the career of a real-life Allison DuBois, a psychic research medium and law enforcement profiler who’s based in Arizona. She’s written a book, “Don’t Kiss Them Goodbye.” Haven’t read it, but here’s a bet on an unknown quantity — this book is more interesting than all the books “dictated” by “spirits” on the other side.
To go to the “Medium” website, click here .
To buy “Don’t Kiss Them Goodbye” from Amazon.com, click here.
