Medium

Upon seeing the success of Lost and Desperate Housewives, two big-budget scripted dramas that buck the current bottom-dollar reality television show trend (at least on network TV), NBC put a lot of marketing muscle behind two of its new mid-season replacements: Committed, a situation comedy I'll probably see eventually, and Medium, a crime drama with a supernatural bent.

Medium was created by Glenn Gordon Caron, writer on such beloved TV shows as Taxi and Moonlighting. Caron's scripting on the pilot episode didn't disappoint -- a good premise with lots of room to develop (if somewhat dogeared from all the paranormal shows that followed in the wake of The X-Files), some pretty snappy dialogue, and a compelling set of characters. (Caron must be applauded for having the nerve to include three young girls under the age of twelve as fairly central figures.) Overall, however, I was reminded of J. Michael Straczynski's science fiction series Babylon 5: there's some good storytelling going on here if you can struggle through the troublesome acting.

Lead actress Patricia Arquette, as the titular Medium, is the main source of frustration in the pilot. Though she illuminated screens single-handedly in pictures like Ed Wood and True Romance, her performance here brings to mind Ed Wood's actual movies. For most of the episode Alison Dubois (Arquette) wanders the set like a zombie, only coming to life when an external force exerts pressure. Maybe it's the fact that her dialogue doesn't fit her character – does an over-worked, over-stressed mother of three trying to gain admittance to law school really crack wise about the sexual undertones of The Partridge Family? Even if she does, wouldn't she deliver it a little less like it were a line with which she wasn't quite comfortable? A lot of Arquette's dialogue sounds like it was written for someone peppier, someone smart-assier, someone – well, younger. (Arquette's makeup and lighting crew could be doing her a few more favors as well. She's not even forty, for Pete's sake -- why does her forehead look like a sand dune?)

Paired with Arquette as her television husband Joe Dubois is Jake Weber, who gives his own character the life that is so obviously missing from Arquette's. His interactions with Alison are as natural as he can make them given the circumstances, and one can only hope that Arquette will tether herself to the rock offered by Weber's talent. The rest of the cast seems competent enough, though we weren't given much of a chance to see them in the pilot. One can hope we'll be seeing more of Miguel Sandoval as the District Attorney for whom Alison works, but the first episode doesn't offer many clues as to the series' future direction. Will it become a "monster of the week" show, a sort of Law and Order: Paranormal Victims Unit? Or will it be less episodic, with a continuing storyline for Alison and her family? Given that the series appears to be based on the life of a "real-life medium" who specializes in child abduction cases, one prays that it won't become Touched By An Angel for the psychic set.

With Medium's fantasy elements and the dialogue that wants to be hipper than the characters who speak it, I was reminded of last year's cancelled Wonderfalls, in which the words flowed naturally from the actors' mouths, the emotional moments were expertly pitched, and I never once felt like someone was sleepwalking through an episode. (Coincidentally, the complete first season of Fox's abruptly cancelled series -- at least the 13 episodes that were filmed, nine of which tragically never aired -- is to be released on DVD in a few weeks.) I'm rooting for Medium to improve and I hope it endures, but so far I'd trade four years of this for thirteen more episodes of Wonderfalls.