Aside from some of the more banal horrors of reality programming, Medium has nothing to rival it as the most frightful hour on television, says Ginia Bellafante. The series, which stars Patricia Arquette as an earnest telepath (Allison Dubois) who lends her powers of premonition to Phoenix law enforcement, has been a quiet success on NBC for four seasons, receiving some of its highest ratings in recent months as the show has delved further into the human capacity for selfishness and intimate depravities.Medium creates a mood of gothic foreboding from the first few seconds of its opening credits. Its score recalls the tense chords of a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, and the accompanying graphics look like the dark and unequivocally right answers to a Rorschach test — mutating hands and faces and evocations of dripping blood. Life in the 21st century provides so many opportunities to terrify us that popular culture has generally seemed enfeebled in its efforts to compete. Over the past decade, as movies have been less frequently consumed in the vulnerable territory of public space, the idea that they might possess the power to scare and undo us has become something of joke, rolfing the horror genre almost entirely into a satire of itself. And if television has been increasingly adept at producing anxiety (24, Lost, Jericho), it has rarely elicited anything resembling sensory fear.
Created by Glen Gordon Caron (and existing at a significant tonal distance from Moonlighting, his other great contribution to television), Medium can be genuinely hard to endure, especially at home, alone, late at night (it is shown at 10 p.m. on Mondays), without wondering whether you should check behind the bedposts for sadists and other wack jobs. Something terrible has always just happened, or is about to, and the viewer bears the apprehensive weight of Allison’s foreknowledge, having witnessed the violently detailed dreams that disrupt her sleep almost every other nocturnal hour. (No one has ever needed a regular prescription of Ambien more.) Sometimes Allison’s forecasts can keep a rape or a killing from occurring. Mostly, though, Allison receives random images in the night — a woman, for example, fighting with her husband in a hotel room in France — only to learn, usually the next day, that someone who looks like the person she dreamt about has disappeared, which propels her toward the evidence that allows the authorities to solve the case. The woman in France, Allison intuited, had been abducted by her embittered ex-husband and then psychologically tortured in a re-creation of the honeymoon suite in Paris that the couple had stayed in years before.
Medium borrows from the conventions of classic horror the idea that real nightmares result from arbitrary or misplaced trust. The camera lingers on the faces of victims in waiting as they put their faith in attackers whose malevolence they cannot yet see. An episode shown in the US early this year revolved around the killing of a little boy, supplying the single most chilling moment on television in quite a long while: a smiling child watched as a man, shot from the waist down, slowly kicked off his shoes and danced to “Rapper’s Delight” in front of him. The little boy had followed his kidnapper out of a toy store, lured by a marionette slung over the man’s back and lost to his father’s distracting business call on his cellphone.
Work, on Medium, has been implicated as a distinctly dangerous pastime more than once. At the end of last US season Allison’s husband, Joe (Jake Weber), an aerospace engineer, and his colleagues were held hostage at gunpoint by a fired employee who, dying of cancer, demanded millions of dollars in compensation for the loss of his health insurance and other benefits. Medium is so committed to the grim realities of middle-class life that it is a paranormal show that very often doesn’t feel like one. This season Joe has no job at all: it’s a tough economy, and he has found it impossible to find another. Allison’s credit cards are declined at a grocery store; her eldest daughter hasn’t gotten her allowance in weeks. Indian call centres operating on behalf of lenders phone the Dubois household constantly, and the bills keep falling, one on top of the other.
When Medium isn’t terrifying us with images of children about to be sodomized and killed, it is unsettling us with its belief that all of our systems and institutions essentially fail us. Families are fragile, and sons kill fathers. Charitable organizations are bilked by greedy maniacs. Journalists are sleazy and operate on falsehoods. (Last season Allison befriended a woman she thought was an out-of-towner looking for company, only to discover, after it was too late, that the woman was a reporter seeking to expose the Phoenix district attorney’s reliance on her unorthodox services.)
And, of course, what does it say about the skills of the show’s police officers and prosecutors that they depend so heavily on the musings of a psychic mother of three? It says that they just cannot hack it with their blood samples and clues and shoe leather. Allison’s notions are almost always infallible, but information isn’t. The scariest message from Medium, says Bellafante, is that we only have our instincts to guide us.
