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Show Inside TV NBC hopes this 'Medium' is a rare hit Ariel and Bridget (Sofia Vassilie-v- a, Maria Lark), along with a new baby girl. All this might seem a bit much even for television, but according to DuBois, it's just another day ByKatsO'Hare Zap2it It doesn't take psychic to know the NBC "Medium," premiering Jan. 3, faces an uphill Monday, in the climb. It has tough opposition in its time slot in CBS' "CSI: Miami," and NBC's track record of launching new dramas this year has been less than stellar; of three, only one, "Medical Investigation," still stands. But "Medium" gets points for three things: at Patricia Ar- - you," he quips, "there's probably not enough crime shows on television. We need another one." Inspired by the real-lif- e story of "research medium and criminal profiler" Allison DuBois, "Medium" stars Arquette as Allison, a Phoenix wife, mother and law student interning in the local district attorney's (Miguel Sandoval) office. In the pilot, Allison decides to test whether the psychic impressions she gets about crimes might just be true and winds up working a case with the Texas Rangers. Along the way, she sees and converses with dead people, divines the sequences of events in a crime, locates a dead body, reads thoughts, and can sense a man's medical condition. At the same time, she's a devoted wife to aerospace engineer Joe (Jake Weber) and mother to daughters . The pilot's pretty accurate," she says from her home in Phoenix. "I was interning in homicide to be a prosecutor, filling in the gaps of crimes. I wanted to prove that I was really doing that, so I faxed some missing-persons cases to law enforce-.9mearound the country, expect- nBnB them to tell me I was full of , quette, whob'rmfn indie-filVfrt Glenn sensibility; creator-write- r Gordon Caron, who already earned his TV immortality for "Moonlighting" (and a soft spot in many hearts for the brilliant but short-live- d "Now and Again"); and the fact that it's trying to take a fresh spin on the crime procedural, an overworked genre if there ever was one, especially this year. This last point, of course, has not escaped Caron. TH grant life. T (i . i nt r j j it, tuiuj uic icias ivuugeia ciiueu me." up getting back to As for her powers, DuBois insists it's all true, even a scene used in promos for the show where she awakens in the night to a bedroom full of the departed. "I see them all the time, so I'm used to it now," she says. "But that was in the beginning, when I didn't want to hear them or see them. That was a very pivotal moment for me, if Tm going to do this or go seek help. But that tffi rn -- happened." Executive producer Kelsey Grammer encountered DuBois when she auditioned for a reality-spilot for Paramount never was produced. A Para- how that mount executive then called Caron, who was living in New York at the time. "He said, 'Do you believe in psychics?' " Caron recalls. "I said, Tim, probably not.' He said, There's a woman that I've met through Kelsey Grammer, and I think her life might make an interesting foundation for a television series.' " Caron flew to Los Angeles and met with DuBois. "I found her story fascinating," he says. "To me, the key is the ardor with which she told it. I never felt it was my job to judge her in that sense! I felt it was my job to take Patricia Arquette (center) stars in "Medium premiering Monday on NBC, as a Phoenix wife, mother and law intern who shares her psychic abilities with her colleagues (Miguel Sandoval, April Grace). her measure, to say, This is her perspective on the world. This is how she sees things. Is there something I can bring to the party as a storyteller, and frankly, is there something I can take away as a storyteller to make an interesting television show?' And there was." While the real DuBois projects a buttoned-dow- n image, Caron's idea for the fictional Allison was to find the contrast between a working mom and a working psychic. Rather than DuBois' real-lif- e look, or the more cliche image of a flamboyant woman with long earrings and a caftan, Caron opted for a third choice. "I believe very strongly," he says, "that in order to have that degree of empathy, that would seem to fly in the face of any real vanity. Those two things contradict each other. The messier everything can be, the less these kids can be, the well-behav- ed more it feels like life. I always think the fantastic works better when presented in relief to the almost mundane." At the show's sets in Manhat- tan Beach, Calif., the house is an ordinary middle-clas- s dwelling, colorfully decorated in Southwestern style and littered with children's toys. Arquette is dressed simply in a button-dow- n blouse and corduroys. The fanciest thing about the whole setting is the beribboned lavender voile canopy wants to raise in a very different way than she was raised." Caron cut his TV teeth on such DuBois that the crew jokingly fight and they have troubles. She's got these kids that she im- shows as "Remington Steele" and "Moonlighting," so he's used to juggling drama, comedy and romance. That's the same balancing act he hopes to achieve here. "One the one hand," he says, "Allison's family life is going to be extraordinarily important to her, but at the same time, you've got provises over the chair of episode director Duane Clark. "Here's a mother of three," Ar- all this death and gore. That's the trick of it. If you can make all quette says. They don't have unlimited resources, so she's not spending that much money on her own clothes. She's had three ally got something, and it's a very different flavor than you see on television. It's a sneaky romance. babies, and she doesn't have time to work out. She's got this great This one just happens to be between a woman who's consumed marriage, but it's imperfect. She's got this great husband, but they with death and a man whose that stuff coexist then you've re- gion is science." reli- |