I see your little Philip now, he's tall and short with black fair hair. His deep brown-blue eyes shine so bright, he plays all day without a care.
Philip Jeays, 'Little Philip'

The first thing I want to say is that I have a deep seated, abiding hatred of “psychics.” Possibly it's because I hung out with the alternative set at university and approximately 40% of my friendship group believed they had some kind of supernatural power. Possibly it's because I'm a jaded old cynic who has lost his sense of the wondrous.

Mostly, though, I think it's something to do with the whole “conning bereaved people out of money by making them think you can talk to their dead children” aspect of the whole deal.

So let's get this out in the open. Psychics, particularly spiritualists, particularly the kind who offer to put you in touch with dead relatives for money are the worst kinds of frauds, charlatans and conmen. They're cynical parasites who feed off human misery. They specifically target the most vulnerable of people and exploit them. They're filth.

And if anybody is even considering drawing the comparison between these vultures and legitimate religions, go away and do some cursory research. Spiritualism always was and always will be a scam, one which very specifically uses the most cynical and manipulative techniques of stage magic and street hustling to get money out of the grief stricken.

One such bloodsucking cynical con-artist is Allison Dubois. Allison Dubois is a psychic who managed to convince a gullible moron who works in broadcasting to make an entire TV series dedicated to making her look like the fucking messiah.

The TV series Medium is about a psychic called Allison Dubois (the real Allison Dubois being credited as a “consultant”) who gives up her not-actually-very-promising law degree to use her “gift” to “help” people by giving meaningless information to the police which, by the magic of television, becomes the key to solving murders and (frequently) stopping rapists, serial killers, and serial killing rapists.

The series has problems both as the television show it pretends to be and as the despicable, reason-hating propaganda it actually is. It's sort of a mystery show, except it isn't, because there is not (and can be) no actual investigation of the mystery. Allison “just knows” things and the structure of an episode will always be about her convincing people to accept these things she knows. She never works anything out (it isn't the role of the medium to interpret what she is told) and there is never any other evidence (the show doesn't like evidence) so every episode is just a question of waiting for Allison to tell you what happened.

Let's be more specific about this.

Every episode follows the same basic formula: Allison will have a vision. It will be completely fucking useless (more on this later). She will go to the DA (for whom she works as a consultant) and tell him about the vision. The DA will say “well that's great, now we know exactly what happened, but we need to find a way to prove it”. Then somebody else will say “but you can't base your case on a psychic's prediction”. Then the DA will go out and dig up some evidence that supports Allison's prediction, then the other guy who doesn't believe in psychics will either (a) immediately decide that she's totally real after all and beg for her forgiveness or (b) turn psycho and yell at her, at which point Allison will whisper, very quietly, something like “you can't intimidate me Mr [BLANK], I'm not the girl you raped in college” at which point they will be rightly cowed.

Every. Single. Episode.

I found the early episodes of Medium fascinating, for roughly the same reasons I find Holocaust Denial fascinating. It's an insight into a totally alien worldview and there's a certain amount of fun to be had pointing at the glaring holes in the logic (not least of which is “not everybody who doesn't believe in psychics is a rapist”). The interesting thing about it is that it basically presents a world that works exactly the way psychics try to con you into believing it works: the spirits of the dead contact Allison with maddeningly vague information and then, through the magic of television, events arrange themselves to show that she was totally right all along.

And that's sort of the problem with the show as drama. Because its primary function is to promote and justify the work of psychics and spiritualists, Allison can never, under any circumstances, be wrong about anything. Nor can anybody use any method other than her visions to solve the crimes she is out to solve (because that would undermine the value of their resident psychic). What this means is that every episode basically revolves around seeing exactly how Allison will be proven right this week.

What's even more interesting is that the ways she is proven “right” frequently revolve around classic cold-reading techniques. For instance in one episode she is given the cryptic message “Australia” and then notices that a mole on her husband's back (which he is having to get biopsied) is “shaped like Australia”. In another she dreams that she is being chased through an airport by a wolf, and at the end of the episode she is chased by an evil policeman called Detective Wolfe. Now on the one hand this is quite clever narrative construction, on the other hand it's exactly the sorts of methods that real “psychics” use every day to convince people they know more than they do. “Not a wolf, but a man named Wolfe, or a wolf-like man” is a short logical step from the old classic “I'm getting a message from an older man … your father? No? But … he was like a father to you.”

The scam that is spiritualism relies on the mark's belief that the spiritualist has absolute authority. The subject willingly allows the psychic to dictate their own feelings and emotions on a subject, in order to help the construction of a lie they desperately want to believe in. In the same way, Allison is allowed to entirely dictate the “reality” of the series. What she says is true, is true, and we are frequently asked to accept it without evidence.

A particularly insulting example of this came in the last episode I could bear to watch before giving up entirely and going to play World of Warcraft. In this particular episode Allison meets a man who is presented to her as a model citizen. He meets her because he reports a burglary, gives an accurate description of the subject, agrees to testify in court and generally acts like a standup good citizen. Allison, however, is convinced (by her gift) that he is actually - you guessed it - a serial rapist and murderer (“he's drawn to their innocence. He rapes them, bathes them, rapes them again, then when he can no longer convince himself that they are still innocent, he kills them”). But however much she gets the cops to look into this guy she can find no evidence that there's anything wrong with him. She also “knows” (remember she “knows” things) that his first victim is a red headed college girl named “Sharona” but again nobody can find any evidence of this Sharona in any missing persons reports.

Anybody care to guess how this one ends? Remember how I said that the interesting thing about Medium is how it relies on the classic tricks of cold reading? Well how about this one: “and you've just recently had somebody new come into your life - a man with, give me a moment, with dark hair. No? No, you're right. The spirits are telling me that this person will come into your life, very soon…”

Yes, the resolution to that particular episode is that this guy is going to become a sexually sadistic serial killer in the future.

What's scary about this episode is that the audience is expected to take this entirely at face value. When Allison confronts Mr Wonderful and says “I know you haven't killed anybody yet, but you want to, and I know you want to” we are, as always, expected to utterly respect her authority. We are expected to condemn this guy as a serial rapist and murderer because Allison Dubois says he is.

In a purely fantasy TV show, I would have less of a problem with this. I loved Buffy and Angel, I was totally down with Doyle and Cordelia getting visions, and Angel using them to save people. I'm actually quite into prophecy as a plot device on the rare occasions that it's handled well. The problem with Medium, though, is that the show is transparently written by people who genuinely believe in this shit (the pilot opens with a white-on black splash screen saying “There really is an Allison. Really.” And of course she's a consultant on the show). That's all kinds of scary. The idea that the moron who commissioned the series might (say) divorce his or her partner, or hell, accuse somebody of being a rapist, just because Allison Dubois has a funny feeling about them and that scares the fuck out of me.