R.I.P. Old Tv Habits

YESTERDAY'S NY TIMES had an interesting appreciation by Ginia Bellafante for the NBC show MEDIUM. In a piece called "Terrifying, Not Unlike Your Real Life," she makes a number of observations.

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 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.

Medium is one of those shows I remember watching three or four episodes of a few years ago and then never troubling myself about again. Patricia Arquette, to me, seemed a soft heroine, and I could never quite get the image of Alabama from True Romance out of my head, which kind of made me want to go back and watch that film instead of Medium.

But one night a few months ago I found myself at my parents house and saw a few minutes of the show. I was interested to see that apparently, a character who had been a prosecutor was now a defence attorney. That kind of flip always interests me. Now with the Times article, there's also the notion that they're actually one of the few shows on American Television playing out the true economic anxieties of most Americans:

Work, on “Medium,” has been implicated as a distinctly dangerous pastime more than once. At the end of last 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 centers operating on behalf of lenders phone the Dubois household constantly, and the bills keep falling, one on top of the other.

So, okay. Bottom line (and this is why articles like this set the NYTimes Arts coverage above most other papers) is that I guess I'm gonna go give Medium another chance.

Which brings up the issue of viewership patterns generally. Since the settlement of the WGA strike, and with the possibility of an Actors strike a real going concern, I know that some data has indicated that viewers have returned. But I haven't. Not really.

These days it seems that my only true "must-sees" are House, 30 Rock, The Office and Battlestar Galactica. I'd like to be watching LOST, but I fell behind and now find it difficult to catch up.

Instead, when I turn to my TV I find myself drawn in by different fare ranging far afield.

In Treament, which caused a brief stir when it premiered, among my peer group seems to be the first series that has arrived in the On-Demand era. I devoured that show in great swaths of five episodes...and judging by the level of conversation I'm hearing about it now, as opposed to weeks ago when it was on -- I think a lot of people are doing the same thing.

I've also kind of fallen in love with the British show Skins, which I'm finally getting a chance to see.

I'm not burning to see a new Knight Rider. And as I slowly start to get my hands on some of the pilot scripts of the upcoming season (if there's no Actor's strike, that is) I can't say I'm actually all that impressed.

So then, to you -- do you have a Medium in your bunch -- a show previously dismissed that you've given a second chance to? Discuss.