Unhappy Medium

I was watching Medium tonight. It's a decent enough show. It's not my favorite thing on television, by any stretch. It's not a show I'd actively try to encourage people to watch. But I do watch it every week, and I find it fairly enjoyable.

Except that I'm often struck by just how much the show could better be titled The Patricia Arquette Show. She is a good actor, and is good on the show. I don't begrudge her the awards she's won playing this character of Allison DuBois. But everyone else on the show? They're all doing repetitive, thankless work. I mentioned this once in passing a long time back. But there's been a lot more episodes of Medium since then, and in this respect, the show hasn't really changed. The rest of the cast is doing thankless, repetitive work.

And none more so than her TV husband, played by Jake Weber. Week in, week out, this man does the same schtick. He probably works about two or three days of a seven-day shooting schedule. At least one full day of that, he spends in his underwear, filming the 98,000th "Allison and Joe in bed" scene (over 3/4s of which are "Allison waking up from a nightmare"). Most of the second day is spent filming "referee the bickering children" scenes.

The throughline of 9 out of 10 of his scenes is trying to convince his television wife that what she thinks is not necessarily what she should be thinking. And 9 out of those 10 times, his character is completely wrong.

Only about twice a season does he get to have a scene with an actor other than Patricia Arquette or one of his television daughters. Only about once a season does he actually get an episode that involves him in any kind of tangible way in the plot.

Added to all this, Michael Ausiello (TV Guide's main rumormonger) claims to have it on good authority that the on set atmosphere of this show is a disaster.

It's a shame. I really liked Jake Weber in the Dawn of the Dead remake, and in the one season that ran of American Gothic (before word was the network asked the creators to write him out... hmm, maybe this guy is cursed!). But this role is totally thankless work.