Medium

[Gav]

Has anyone watched this? It's gotten rave reviews from TV critcs [admittedly from the lower end of the spectrum] over here, but I can't bring myself to watch it as: it promotes [by claiming its based on real events]superstitous rubbish and I find these sorts of dramas interminably dull.

Here's what the Herald (a Glasgow based broadsheet) had to say:

Originally Posted by IAN BELL

According to the publicity, Allison DuBois is a real person. This gives her an advantage over most of the characters in Medium, but it also raises troubling questions.
First up: is the fine city of Phoenix, Arizona, truly relying on a psychic housewife for its law-enforcement needs in the 21st century? If so, why has the mass impeachment of public officials not yet taken place? If doubly so – and Ms DuBois may have seen this one coming – is modern American life really as badly-scripted as some of the TV shows America scatters across the planet like so much defoliant?
The last time I mentioned any of this, in the context of the fine city of New Orleans, we had e-mails from places such as the fine state of Kentucky questioning my right to exist. Good point. For once, though, I am not actually kidding. It is astounding, if true, that a woman's "intuitions" are guiding cops in any part of the world. It is rather worse to be told that such hogwash is being passed off as serious drama.
As a professional courtesy, now and then I read the American TV critics.
Apparently they think very highly of Medium. They believe that Patricia Arquette (as DuBois) is a fine actress (true) who brings an emotional resonance to the role of the working mum, or mom, grown accustomed to waking up with her husband's dead father in the bed beside her.
The hacks also seem to find nothing peculiar in the idea of a woman who dreams with prescient accuracy of necrophiliac serial-killers. After as much higher education as I could manage, I have only one word at my disposal for that revelation: what?
No, I'm mistaken. Here comes another word, an Americanism: "Normalised." What is it about the God-drenched culture of the United States that makes Allison's righteous jury-tampering seem not only heroic but plausible? When did any of this begin to seem normal? Last night, DuBois was using her psychic smarts to help the DA in his efforts to find 12 people happy to send Mr Psycho to the chair. She had no quibbles over electrocution. Her only problem was the reliability of her "gift".
This viewer's problem with Ms DuBois, real and fictional, has something to do with the world view inherent in Medium. Death, God and assorted afterlives can be accepted as stock themes of western culture. But doesn't a psychic, even "a psychic with a bad memory", presume a sort of mass, witless superstition?
The God-fearing among you can deal with obvious blasphemy. In my world, there is a real and growing problem caused by the bizarre things ordinary Americans are, apparently, prepared to believe.
Still, it's only TV, a world that edits out all inconvenient truths.

You can read the rest of the review here but I doubt that the reviewer's mauling of the recent Austen* adpation will be of much interest anyway.

*Personally I find Pride and Prejuidice a dull story anyway. It propagates some of the worst stereotypes that have crept into the common conciousness that I have ever read. And don't tell me that it's well written, it's not. Enjoy it if you must but don't expect to change my opinion of it.

[DJ Apostrophe]

I've tried to watch Medium twice, the first episode, and then one a few weeks later. Neither of them interested me, the characters I found obnoxious, and I just did not enjoy the show in any manner. Thus, I now avoid it like the plague... YMMV.

-w

[veeco]

I didn't watch the show, nor did I even know about its existence before reading this thread.

However, I must say that I am not surprised, given that there are some political figures here in France (and perhaps somewhere else) who are notorious to using psychics and mediums to help them make decisions (and important decisions that concern the whole nation, for that!)

What can I say, we elected and keep electing idiots...

[noodle]

lost >>>>> medium

[Inquartata]

Lost>>>Medium>>>Ghost Whisperer>>>imitations ad nauseam...


Actually, I like the show. It's not going onto my top ten list or anything, but it's a pleasant and inoffensive way to keep my mind busy while I'm working out. I don't buy the psychic premise any more than Gav does, but then neither do I buy the premises of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", the abovementioned "Lost", or for that matter most of the programs on television. It's fluff entertainment, and sometimes the willing suspension of disbelief is as necessary as it is with reading novels...

[Gav]

The problem I have with it is that is purports to be basd on a 'real' medium. Du Bois has been thoroughyl debunked in the past. Such claims simpy reinforce this idea that their may be something in it. Buffy et al make no such claims. And by the way don't start me on Lost that show is dross.