Eerily Real

t’s conventional TV wisdom: functional married couples do not a good TV drama make. Just look at this year’s Golden Globe nominees: In 24, Kiefer’s saving the world as a single guy; his wife was killed off at the end of season one. The only married couple that survived the plane crash in Lost doesn’t speak English, so spousal dialogue is limited to subtitles and fevered gesticulation. Carmela and Tony Soprano may be back together, but they’re just biding their time until death or divorce. The relationship-impaired plastic surgeons of Nip/Tuck fuck everything in sight. And while its title might seem concerned with long-term effects of nuptials, Deadwood is not.
    Yet with the help of the ethereal Patricia Arquette, NBC’s new drama Medium has vanquished convention. Reviews have focused on the show’s fantastical premise — Arizona soccer mom Allison Dubois sees dead people and helps the police solve crimes — but the most addictive element of Medium is something else entirely: its portrayal of domestic mundanities, the erotic little details of coupledom.
    The background: Allison was a stay-at-home mom whose visions recently led her to a part-time job in the D.A.’s office. Joe, her sensitive, shaggy-haired husband, is an aerospace engineer who’s patient but skeptical. We watch them bicker over the bathroom sink in the a.m. (he’s a morning person, she’s not). We watch them try to appease their three daughters with three different breakfasts. We watch them kiss each other goodbye as they head off in separate directions. And later that night, we hope like hell she’s in the mood for the quickie he’s proposed. With their flirtations, mood swings and squabbles, Allison and Joe have become the most empathetic couple on TV in years — at least since ABC’s late, lamented Once and Again.
   It helps that they actually look like a couple. (As has been noted elsewhere, TV producers keep churning out schlubby hubbies with hot wives — will Amnesty International please airlift Jami Gertz out of Still Standing?) Allison and Joe could have been the beautiful, sort-of-granola couple you knew in college. Their chemistry is real. When Joe springs dinner plans involving two of his colleagues on Allison first thing in the morning (she’s still in bed, he’s already dressed), she sarcastically says, “I can barely keep my legs together at the mere thought of it.” His retort: “that’s okay, I’m not much interested in you with your legs together anyway.” Her smirk indicates the feeling is mutual. When Joe comes home to an ecstatic Allison (the D.A. called, meaning she gets a respite from baby duty), she jumps into his arms and says, half-jokingly, “Dad, say hi to the kids," who proceed to draw intently at the kitchen table while Joe carries Allison into the bedroom for a little pre-dinner nookie, closing the door in our face.
    Allison and Joe are a couple who have sex and like it, even though Joe’s hair always looks like it should have been cut a week ago and Allison wears wrinkled men’s shirts that probably fit her better pre-pregnancy. They have a Volvo station wagon. They don’t live in the traditional 7th Heaven two-story white/bright Colonial. There’s no wacky nanny or housekeeper. At night, they decompress with a beer or glass of wine. (When’s the last time you’ve seen non-problem drinking in TV drama?)
    They also communicate, and fail to communicate, like real people. During a pregnancy scare, Joe offers that he’ll be around to help. “You can gain the sixty pounds and have the hemorrhoids, then,” snaps Allison. “That’ll really help.” (Later in the episode, they talk frankly about Joe’s desire for a son and his disappointment that all of their girls take after Allison.) In another episode, Allison finds the home phone number of someone named Kelly in one of Joe’s pockets. Instead of asking him about it, she spends days in a paranoid stupor, alternately jumping down his throat for little things — being late, wearing a two-year-old shirt — and apologizing. When Kelly turns out to be a man (apparently, Allison’s psychic powers only extend to other families), Allison does what most of us would do after discovering that we misjudged a partner’s infidelity — she says nothing.
    The writers nail this stuff, from the little flirtations to the irrational outbursts and post-freakout “talks” conducted after the kids have gone to sleep. “Are we okay?” Allison asks one night before bed, having spent the day solving the murder of a police officer with whom she’d chatted, post mortem, the previous morning. “Of course,” says Joe. ” We’re just tired.”
    The formula for constructing a TV couple is essentially thus: regardless of how plucky (Teri Hatcher in Lois and Clark) or brawny (Jessica Alba in Dark Angel) or seductive (Jennifer Garner in Alias) our heroine is, she must be young and single, and assigned to work alongside someone with whom seasons of unrequited sexual tension can lead up to a momentous coupling, approximately after four seasons and/or when viewers have lost interest. It’s not only remarkable that Medium subverted this formula from the get-go, but that creator Glenn Gordon Caron basically patented the formula twenty years ago with Moonlighting.
    Back in 1986, nothing reinforced the drudgery of family life more than watching a then-fully-haired Bruce Willis sparring with Cybill Shepherd, and hoping they’d give in to passion, rip each other’s clothes off and fuck on the Xerox machine. Who’d want to watch them changing diapers and making casseroles? The reason why my ten-year-old self didn’t equate “drama” with my parents’ incessant fighting — about carpool duty, his workaholism, her secret smoking — is still lost to me, but apparently the seductiveness of that kind of drama is no longer lost to Caron.
    So Allison’s psychic powers have become the backdrop to a larger, arguably more compelling story: the state of her family. It’s strangely vexing in its simplicity. Because Allison and Joe act like a couple we might want to emulate in the harrowing psychodrama called modern marriage (they have healthy libidos, go out on dates, have friends and didn’t eschew all of their vices) and because we see them doing things we could do (going batshit after spending the day home alone with a toddler, making snarky jokes about being in the mood), we watch their daily interactions obsessively, scanning for signs of impending collapse.
    Medium has been criticized for flouting the traditional idea of dramatic tension — if Allison’s visions are always right, where’s the suspense? Luckily the show has given itself some creative breathing room over the past few weeks: we know Allison’s visions might be inaccurate, or essayed from the past or future. Sure, we know she’ll probably help the D.A. catch each week’s depraved murderer eventually. What we don’t know is how Allison’s powers will affect her marriage. Here, sexual tension is more than will-they-or-won’t-they; in Medium, they did, they do, but will it last?  n°