…but as long as there aren’t any new episodes of the show floating around out there, anyway, I have to say that I’m really psyched for the new season of “Medium,” which premieres tonight at 10 PM on NBC, in the slot that once housed our current favorite time-travel drama.
I’ve long been on record as admitting that, for as much as I’ve loved each of the three seasons of “Medium” that have been released on DVD – and for the obligatory plug, you can find those here, here, and here – but I’ve never followed the show from week to week. I don’t even really have a good excuse for it; it’s just one of those cases where either it was up against a show I was already addicted to or, more likely, I just plain forgot when it was on. (So sue me: I’ve got a two-year-old, and my concentration ain’t what it used to be.) But after thrilling to Season 3, which ended by changing the dynamic of the series that felt realistic rather than an attempt at bringing in new viewers, I can honestly say that even if there wasn’t a writer’s strike and even if I wasn’t starved for new scripted programming, I’d still be tuning in to Season 4 of “Medium.”
Quick catch-up: Alison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) is a happily married mother of three little girls who went to school to study law before real life got in the way, so now she works part-time for the District Attorney of Phoenix, Arizona, and…oh, right, she has dreams and visions where she communicates with the dead – or vice versa, as the case may be – and uses the information she receives to solve crimes. Yeah, yeah, I know, it sounds like the makings of a show that’d be front and center on the Lifetime network…and the fact that the show’s reruns actually air on Lifetime makes it hard to disagree with that suggestion. But in addition to “Medium” containing one of the most realistic television marriages ever (thanks to the great chemistry between Arquette and her TV husband, Jake Weber) and some of the better child actors in recent memory (particularly Sofia Vassilieva as the teenaged Ariel), the show is also home to some of the creepiest shit this side of a Stephen King novel.
When Season 3 ended, the DuBois family was dealing with some serious issues. Alison’s abilities, which had always been kept under wraps by D.A. Manuel Devalos (Miguel Sandoval), were revealed by a very skeptical journalist – a deliciously sleazy turn from Neve Campbell – and resulted in Devalos being “given” a leave of absence and Alison being let go from the department and becoming persona non grata to everyone with whom she’d previously worked, including Detective Lee Scanlon (David Cubitt). And as if that didn’t shrinking the family income enough, Joe (Weber) ended up losing his job following a work-related hostage incident, due to corporate insurance concerns about his psychological well-being and his wife’s newfound reputation as a crackpot.
So now what?
Enter Anjelica Huston. Still having visions and dreams but unable to do anything with the information she’s receiving about a little boy who’s been kidnapped, Alison contacts Ameritips, an organization that’s been trying to solve the case, and meets with Cynthia Keener (Huston), an investigator with the group. Keener is decidedly skeptical when Alison explains how she came about her information, but she suggests that Keener Google her, and – no surprise – she soon gets a callback. Keener is still skeptical, but she’s willing to take Alison’s information with a grain of salt. The eventual result is a new, if uneasy, alliance between the two…and, more importantly, a paycheck coming into the Dubois’ bank account.
A word of warning: there’s a shot in tonight’s episode that is so downright disconcerting that it actually took my breath away for a second. It’s not really a spoiler to suggest that it involves the kidnapped boy, since it’s a longstanding tradition with “Medium” that Alison’s visions don’t always come to pass, but I’ll just say that if you’re a parent and you’ve ever even briefly allowed yourself to fear what could happen in that moment when you realize you don’t know where your kid’s run off to, it’ll make your blood run cold.
I’ve also seen next week’s episode, and while I’ll save most of my observations about that for next Monday, I will say that it’s also really good and, as with the upcoming new season of “Jericho,” I can’t help but think that the writer’s strike might actually pay off for “Medium.” People want new stuff to watch, they’re willing to consider shows that they might not ordinarily watch, and based on what I’m seeing so far, “Medium” – like fellow NBC show “Law & Order” – is starting so damned strong with its new episodes that it might just find a resurgence in popularity that it hasn’t seen in quite some time.
