Shows You Can Only Watch in Daylight

Posted by Maggie February 5th, 2006 at 03:39pm In Guilty Pleasures

It’s not a very auspicious way to begin this blog, but I have a confession to make: I like watching Medium.

Medium follows soccer-mom-slash-psychic Alison Dubois as she solves extraordinarily brutal crimes, one trippy dream sequence at a time. Alison is played by Patricia Arquette, who I have never liked in anything, but is appropriately chubby and passive-agressive for the part. The rest of the cast is low-key (to the point of mumbling) and likeable, especially hot scientist-slash-husband Joe and endearingly kooky middle child Bridget.

But I know what you’re thinking. Maggie, you’re thinking, what are you doing? This is a show about a soccer mom who is also a psychic. Are there two roles in society that could be further from your own? What kind of ridiculous concept are you going to accept next? What about this show, exactly, made you put it in the “record all episodes” list?

Well, I’ll tell you, world. It scares the crap out of me. And then it makes me feel better.

You’d think that after a while Alison’s dream sequences would tend to fall into a pattern, and then cease to be scary. But you would be wrong. Alison’s participation in the dream is always changing. She’s the killer. She’s the victim. She’s a helpless bystander. She’s watching it all like a movie. It’s happening literally. It’s an elaborate metaphor. It never happened at all.

And even when her dreams aren’t about violence and psychopaths and people-butchers and whatnot, they manage to get to some real psychological ickiness. For example, in a show I just watched, Alison kept having dreams that she was in a mental hospital, and that no one believed she was Alison. It would happen slowly: she forgets her ID badge. Her car’s not in its usual place. Someone else is in her house. And then all of a sudden she’s been manhandled into a mental facility, and no one can look sane when they’re being dragged down a dark hallway by two enormous men in lab coats. It’s scary, the idea that you could be hallucinating your whole life. That in fact the real you is locked in a dark room someplace being pushed around by Nurse Ratched and getting electroshock therapy.

And then, in the end, Alison always finds a way to gain power from her dreams. She catches the bad guy, she solves the riddle. The dreams aren’t scary any more because she knows what they mean. She can take the muddled inconsistencies that float into her brain and act on them, and isn’t there something kind of admirable in that? Yes, she is a psychic soccer mom. But aren’t we all?