Spirits of the Age

By James Poniewozik

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.

Despite Medium's quick success, there are a few catches to doing spooky on TV. Compared with movies, a continuing series has limits both on special effects and plot options. As Noxon puts it, "You have a lot of characters who you can't kill off." And there's a fine line between the supernatural and religion, a subject that truly horrifies controversy-averse programmers.

Medium's spirituality is inoffensively generic--the standard apparitions caught between our world and an undefined "other side." (Likewise, CBS's Joan offers a smiling, nondenominational God.) NBC will take a more boldly religious tack later this spring with Revelations (debuts April 13), a six-episode series investigating a sequence of events that suggests the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation is under way.

Written by David Seltzer (who also wrote the Ur-Apocalyptic flick The Omen), the show has some of the religious intrigue of The Da Vinci Code and some of the grim phantasmagoria of The Passion of the Christ--two successes NBC would clearly like to have rub off on it. "In the tumultuous times we live in," says NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly, who green-lighted both Medium and Revelations, "Apocalyptic theory and big existential questions tend to be on the rise."

Revelations, like Medium and The X-Files before it, uses a believer-skeptic pairing. Sister Josepha Montifiore (Natascha McElhone) belongs to an order of nuns, at odds with the Vatican, that believes the Second Coming is imminent; her reluctant partner, Dr. Richard Massey (Bill Pullman), is a secular academic. But the series leaves no room for doubt that otherworldly events are going on. In the pilot, there is a bona fide miracle (the shadow of Christ appears on a mountainside in Mexico), a Satanist cuts off his own finger without bleeding, and a baby--who may be the Antichrist or Christ reborn--impossibly survives a shipwreck. It's over-the-top stuff, but so is the Book of Revelation itself, and while the dialogue is campy and portentous ("All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days!"), it delivers a good old New Testament scare.

While NBC may want to reach religious conservatives who bought up Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of Armageddon books and saw The Passion in droves, Revelations could also offend some of them. Its heroes are seeking to forestall the Apocalypse--even though for some believers, the end of days, and the establishment of Christ's kingdom, is to be hoped for. (Revelations could become a regular series, in which case ending the world would hurt its syndication chances.)

Seltzer, however, says he wants to entertain people of all religious backgrounds, or none. "I consider the Bible one of the great mystery thrillers of all time," he says. And, he adds, the story has topical appeal: "If you look at [the Book of] Revelation and what it says about the end of days"--war, famine, plague--"the world it describes looks like the world around us."

Of course, the endlessly interpretable vision of Revelation also looks like the world at many other times in history. There is a kind of vanity in Apocalyptic thinking: people eternally want to believe they are so special, their times so afflicted, that their tribulations outclass any others in history. It is oddly boastful to believe that one's generation has screwed up the world badly enough to prompt the birth of the Antichrist. Ghost stories like Medium too appeal to our egotism. They assume that the dead are concerned above all with giving closure to the living.

But that's what TV has in common with religion: each helps millions of people, sitting down to hear the same message, individually feel special. And the networks' revived spiritualism will probably continue next season: one NBC drama in development, for instance, is about a character who has regular conversations with Jesus. It is ironic, perhaps, that TV should discover this after an election cycle in which Hollywood was tarred as a bastion of humanists hostile to religion. We can argue all the way to 2008 about the spiritual values of TV. But for now, it certainly values spirits. o