God’s work Medium and Point Pleasant fight — or join — the Devil, plus the Kumars BY JOYCE MILLMAN
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With her breathy monotone and serene spaciness, Patricia Arquette always seems to be in a trance. Which makes her extremely well suited to her new NBC drama series, Medium (Mondays at 10 p.m.), in which she plays a psychic who sees dead people.

A mid-season starter, Medium has surpassed ratings expectations opposite tough competition (CBS’s CSI: Miami) and has already been picked up for the full 2005–2006 season. Arquette’s character, Allison DuBois (who is based on a real-life medium), is a married mother of three young daughters who uses her psychic abilities to help law enforcement in Phoenix, Arizona, solve homicides. Allison originally wanted to be a lawyer, but motherhood interrupted her studies. Medium features the requisite trippy dream sequences — Allison’s psychic antennae work best when she’s asleep — and 11th-hour plot twists where Allison inevitably realizes that her dreams didn’t mean what she thought. The mysteries are hardly challenging — at least not for viewers. Allison, however, seems clueless much of the time (odd, given that she can read people’s minds), or maybe it’s just Arquette’s natural fogginess.

Medium is not particularly dazzling, but it does have an oddball charm. Arquette is a ripe earth mother here, practically bursting the seams of her dowdy blouses and skirts. It’s refreshing to see an actress playing a mother of three children who looks as if she’d actually borne three children. Even more appealing is the crackling interplay between Arquette and floppy-haired Jake Weber as Allison’s husband. Joe is an aerospace engineer who can often be found chained to the stove making breakfast for the DuBois brats (these sour girls are the most unappealing kids in prime time) or peeking out of the shower to tease his wife with some adorably petulant wisecrack about her wacko ESP. Joe and Allison argue believably and make out even more believably. Joe is, in a word, hot. He’s the real reason women are watching Medium in droves, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The most interesting thing about Medium is the confused little dance it does to appease the moral-values mob. After all, the righteous used to burn women like Allison at the stake. No wonder the show is careful to include a scene where Allison attributes her visions to "a higher power" (even as she explains that she is "no holy roller") and a scene where she helps the spirit of a dead boy depart this astral plane with hypnotic descriptions of a beautiful, puffy, Christian-style Heaven where grandma and grandpa are waiting for him. There’s nothing really objectionable about the way Medium is covering its ass. Better this than ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, with its cheap, mawkish proselytizing for Jesus and Sears — now that’s the TV show that best encapsulates George W. Bush’s second-term America. Medium simply gauzes itself in a shimmery, nebulous, generic Hollywood idea of faith and hopes this will pass muster with the crusaders. After all, under our new theocracy, nobody wants to be accused of consorting with Satan.

SAY WHAT YOU WILL about Fox, it’s the only broadcast network that’s not running scared from the torch-bearing zealots. To its credit, it hasn’t joined the hallelujah chorus and renamed The Simpsons as The Ned Flanders Show or anything like that. And despite some stern admonishments from the punditry, it went right ahead and aired that reality show about the woman who had to figure out which middle-aged loser was her biological father. Fox is the last bastion of free speech, secularism, and good old-fashioned sleaze on the broadcast airwaves.

Of course, there are those who might say that Fox is doing the Devil’s work for an audience of gullible, godless liberals. (It’s rumored that the young Beelzebub once interned for Rupurt Murdoch and the two are still very close, but I’m not sure I believe it.) Which brings us to Fox’s recently launched soap Point Pleasant (Thursdays at 9 p.m.). The story began with the babe-acious teenage daughter of Satan washing up on the beach at Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Christina Nickson (Elisabeth Harnois) was rescued by hunky lifeguard Jesse (Sam Page) and taken in by the town doctor, his depressed wife, and their tomboyish teenage daughter Judy (Aubrey Dollar). Christina and Judy quickly bonded like long-lost sisters — indeed, Judy had recently lost her sister in a surfing accident — and soon Christina and the lifeguard were also getting cozy, to the envy of his freakishly collagenated girlfriend.

But Christina has come to Point Pleasant for a reason: she’s on a secret mission to find out who her parents really are. She was raised by an old millionaire, but she knows he’s not her real dad. As for her mom, all she has is a snapshot of a young woman inside a church in Point Pleasant and a classified church document in which the woman claims Christina was a virgin birth. No wonder Christina feels she’s, like, different. It isn’t just that she has the mark of the Beast in one of her irises. It’s also that she can make horrible things happen to people just by thinking angry thoughts about them. Christina wants to be good, but sometimes it’s so much more fun to be bad!

Executive-produced by Marti Noxon, who was Joss Whedon’s right-hand woman on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Point Pleasant is part booty call in the manner of Fox’s hit soap The OC and part supernatural thriller. Actually, "thriller" is stretching it a bit. Stilted and obvious, Point Pleasant is the least thrilling booty-call soap about the daughter of Satan you could imagine. It’s a disappointing comedown for Noxon, who has already done the "girl coming of age with secret powers" thing as well as it’s ever going to be done. Point Pleasant is too dumb to care about and ponder in the way that we cared about and pondered Buffy. The acting is ludicrous, from the vacant Harnois (who resembles those other blow-up-doll blondes, Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera) to the rest of the "teens" who don’t look a day under 30 to the D-list adult actors who litter the beachfront like so much television driftwood. (I trust you haven’t been wondering what Grant Show has been up to since Melrose Place ended.) It’s all like a piece of hapless Stephen King–inspired fan fiction, except not nearly as funny.

There is one fascinating thing about Point Pleasant, abysmal though it is, and that’s its prominent placement of mundane religious imagery. For instance, though the girls on the show dress in skanky short-shorts and bikini tops, they wear pious little crucifixes around their necks. And in one scene of the pilot episode, the camera lingered on the Jesus fish affixed to the rear of the lifeguard’s SUV. If Point Pleasant displayed a glimmer of intelligence or satirical wit, I would say that the show is trying to make a statement about how there’s a difference between thoughtlessly displaying the symbols of faith and truly believing in God. But Point Pleasant is no Joan of Arcadia. That’s the one show in prime time that has the courage of its convictions; it dares to inspire viewers (those who believe and those who don’t) to ponder thorny moral and ethical questions. No, I suspect Point Pleasant is more concerned with matters of the flesh (and the ratings) than the soul. Those crucifixes and that Jesus fish are just there as a diversionary tactic to make Americans who identify themselves as being very concerned with, you know, faith and, whatchamacallit, moral thingies to think they’re watching a faith-and-morals show. The Devil is in the details. Way to go, Devil!

MY BIG FAT INDIAN SIT-COM. You know an ethnic group has made it when mainstream TV thinks it’s funny enough for its own show. The Kumars at No. 42 recently began a second season on BBC America (Wednesdays at 10 p.m.) with a new-found publicity push. Granted, South Asians have a higher profile in England than in the States. But even here, Indian is the new Chinese — gastronomically speaking, at least. The Kumars debuted on the BBC in 2001; its popularity led to adaptations in other countries, including Israel and Morocco, as well as the 2003 Fox flop The Ortegas. The series’s first season belatedly arrived on BBC America in 2004.

The wide appeal of The Kumars isn’t hard to figure. Almost every people like to see their culture and ethnicity acknowledged, even if they’re held up for (affectionate) laughs. The Kumars are immigrants who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and now live in middle-class splendor in the manicured London suburb of Wembley. Dad Ashwin (Vincent Ebrahim) and Mom Madhuri (Indira Joshi) dote on their pampered only child, the adult Sanjeev. Played by the show’s creator, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Sanjeev aspires to stardom. Determined that his son should have all the advantages, Ashwin built him a TV studio in the backyard. Now, Sanjeev hosts a talk show from this garishly appointed base. He’s like a cuddly version of Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy.

In the talk show within a sit-com, celebrities like Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Jones, and Patrick Stewart are welcomed into the Kumar home and plied with homemade samosas. Then they’re ushered onto the talk-show set and peppered with questions by the earnest, if self-deluded, Sanjeev and his ever-present family. Ashwin’s contributions usually involve bragging about how he came to England with nothing and look at how rich he is now. Madhuri congratulates guests on their "lovely manners." Rambunctious Grandma, or "Ummi" (Meera Syal, who is not elderly in real life), sits with her legs open, heckles Sanjeev, and makes randy remarks to the male guests. She’s the Punjabi equivalent of Sophia on The Golden Girls. The Kumars is a delightful and often screamingly funny way to spend 40 minutes. Stick around for Goodness Gracious Me, which follows; this is the first American airing of Bhaskar & Syal’s groundbreaking BBC skit show from the late ’90s. The program is filled with part-loving, part-exasperated send-ups of South Asian culture, as well as pointed satire of Western misconceptions and prejudices.