TV is the New Reading

Fifth season of “Medium” plays to its strengths

After a season’s worth of public humiliation, disorientation and unemployment, the DuBois family is back and ready to take on all challenges – murderers, identity theft and ... naked teachers?

The psychic gifts Allison DuBois uses to solve crimes on NBC’s “Medium” have shown up in her children before. Her oldest is more aware of her folks’ finances than they’d like her to be. Her youngest can watch cable channels no one else can see. And her middle child, Bridgette, can’t stop drawing her art teacher in the altogether.

At first, her artwork is seen as a childish faux pas, but things get a bit darker when she can’t seem to draw anything else. Soon her compulsion has her in tears as she wants desperately to obey her parents and teachers in not drawing the man (and nothing else), but just can’t help herself.

As the fifth season gets under way with this week’s premiere, there’s a similar sense of urgency for everything to get back to normal. Joe is busy inventing the next big thing in green energy development, and Allison is back at the district attorney’s office with a new mystery to solve.

Her gifts are back to their old tricks, however, being sometimes more confusing than helpful. Seems Allison’s boss, District Attorney Manuel Devalos, has a friend who lost her husband in a car wreck, only to have his soul resurface in another body. Allison’s visions reflected this mixup, which raised its own questions for her and for everyone else. And it holds together until a much more mundane but equally chilling explanation reveals itself.

The problem with this show is that it’s an hour long. If Allison is operating at full strength – and there’s no reason for her not to be – then her gifts and insights aren’t going to lead her as far astray as they do and there aren’t going to be an initial 20 minutes of false starts and apologies. The reason everyone has to keep asking her “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” is that even though she’s always managed to be right – eventually – her visions are rarely a hole-in-one. Extending the metaphor, her initial impressions don’t even get her on the green a lot of the time, and law enforcement officials following her leads have, in the past, ended up spending a lot of time in the rough.

Now, when the full meaning of her visions become clear, she’s still way more insightful than the average bear. But whoever designs these visions seems to build in a couple extra layers of vague and confusing that seriously isn’t helping either them or her.

But ignoring all that for the moment, the show is ultimately driven by its characters. The interaction and chemistry between Jake Weber and Patricia Arquette as Joe and Allison DuBois is a solid centerpiece for the show, and after a shaky fourth season, it’s great to see them back, bright and better than ever.

As for Bridgette’s teacher, mildly embarrassed as well he might have been, he was certainly grateful to learn of the melanoma her compulsive artwork managed to diagnose in plenty of time for treatment.

The fifth season of “Medium” bumps merrily along at 9 p.m. Mondays on NBC.

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