I’ve been sleeping with Patricia Arquette. Patricia Arquette is probably best known for her role portraying psychic Allison DuBois in the series Medium, for which Arquette won an Emmy in 2005. Medium was so good that when NBC cancelled it after five seasons, CBS picked it up and gave it a sixth and a seventh season. (All seven seasons are now on the Paramount+/CBS streaming platform.) Created by the great Glenn Gordon Caron (Remington Steel, Moonlighting, Bull), and executive produced by Kelsey Grammar, among others, it was beloved.
When cast, Arquette, blonde, bosomy, and more full-figured than most TV actresses, was told to lose weight, but she pushed back, arguing that a woman with a job and three children would have a figure just like hers. Much of the show takes place in the marital bed, as Allison DuBois constantly is visited by dreams that provide fuzzy clues to Phoenix area murders. Allison’s regular bedmate is a lanky, copper-haired husband, played by Jake Weber. Papa DuBois usually wears boxer shorts and a t-shirt, and Arquette usually wears a large slip, long pajamas, or even a robe, her too normal-sized body under a blanket, only the impressive decolletage in the shot. So I’m currently sleeping with both Patricia Arquette and Jack Weber, but it isn’t at all erotic. Among other things, the three daughters have inherited the DuBois psychic abilities, and often wake up from a nightmare about some crime and come running while crying into the marital bedroom.
Instead it’s just comforting. I know all the dialogue and all the plots. I’m part of the 10 percent of Americans who have insomnia (and the 30-50 percent who’ve experienced insomnia at some time). Almost half the population report using music, fairy tales, or other soothing content to wind down and fall asleep. Before she died, I’d hear, when visiting, sermons on cassette tapes playing from my mother’s bedroom. The late Twitter commentator Scott Adams would report on his daily X broadcast that people were telling him they’d listen to his Rumble podcast to fall asleep.
Some episodes of Medium are better for falling asleep to than others, so I pick those if what I am trying to do is fall back asleep. The fact that the show is about an intact, happy family, and that a significant chunk of it occurs with a husband and wife whispering to each other in a darkened bedroom, makes it less jarring than it should be given that serial killers (and ghosts of serial killers) appear regularly.
But Medium has other virtues. The people in charge of casting were smart. The careers of Arquette, Weber, and the four girls (two were twins) who played their daughters had Medium as their high point. But other actors on the show fared better. Sister Roseanna Arquette and brother David each appear in an episode of Medium. Kelsey Grammar is the Angel of Death and Molly Ringwald plays a blind woman being stalked by a neighbor. Tracy Pollan is another, perhaps more gifted, psychic who uses her powers in the more lucrative field of Fortune 500 forecasting, but finds herself tempted to use her knowledge of the future to allow her boss to be murdered so she can become the CEO. Much of season 3 finds Allison trying to protect a skeptical journalist played by Neve Campbell from a lady killing Jason Priestly. Much of season 4 finds Allison working for a private eye played by Anjelica Huston and as a byproduct solving the decade-old mystery of the abduction of the PI’s daughter, by a sociopath played by Lily Rabe.
Some of my favorite episodes are standalones, not part of that season’s plot arc, that showcase future megastars in their first, or very-early TV appearances. Jennifer Lawrence appears twice, once as the ghost of a girl working in her mother’s bridal shop who’s murdered at work, and then as a 15-year-old Allison DuBois who’s picked up with a friend by the police when she goes to an event where she’s underage (a cop who gives the girls rides home to their parents… so he can force himself on the last girl dropped off). My favorite then-unknown was a young Phoenix area girl, Riley Stone, who was cast to play a daughter of a local politician who fakes her own death to implicate her sexually abusive father in the “murder.” It was the first year she appeared in television or film. She changed her stage name the next year, and Emma Stone went on to be as big a star as Jennifer Lawrence, and lately prefers material that’s at least as odd and violent as the episode of Medium where she started.