VISION QUEST.(Medium)(Television Program Review)

Is there anything more boring than other people's dreams? Much as we may find our friends interesting, their dreams, unless they involve a vivid catastrophe, or include us, are opaque and unrevealing; they also remind us that we're all tragically stuck inside our own heads. This is even more true on television than it is in real life, because we're constantly aware that the TV writers are just cooking up the dream as a plot device; it's almost always too literally "dreamlike," as if filmed through a gauzy filter or Vaseline, and too obviously symbolic, while at the same time seeming to be chosen from a limited menu of weird twists. The only exception I can think of in recent years is the marathon dream that Tony had in an episode of "The Sopranos" last season (it took up almost half the show), which seemed as rich, and as worthy of interpretation, as one of our own.

The new NBC series "Medium," which was created by Glenn Gordon Caron, not only regularly features a character's dreams but hinges on them. Patricia Arquette stars as a woman named Allison Dubois, who has encounters, both when she's asleep and when she's awake, with the spirits of dead people. The series is based on the life of a real medium of the same name, who, like the fictional Allison, is called on by law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. At the beginning of the first episode, the words "There really is an Allison . . ." appear against a black background, and, in case we're not convinced, the next frame says "Really." This doesn't prove anything, of course, but then the show generally doesn't waste much time trying to prove the validity of the practice of mediumship, as its peeps call it. Skepticism is given some due in the second episode: shortly after Allison has been hired as a consultant by the district attorney in Phoenix, and has begun work on a case involving the sentencing of a convicted rapist and murderer, her husband, Joe (Jake Weber), an aerospace engineer, questions her confidence in the accuracy of her visions. As it turns out, there was a "mistake," of potentially huge proportions, in one of her dreams, but in that particular case it happened not to matter; the show gets to have it both ways, establishing that Allison is only human and that she's essentially right.

Before becoming a consultant to the D.A., Manuel Devalos (Miguel Sandoval), Allison was an intern in his office, preparing for law school. It was her visions that made her decide that she was "constitutionally incapable" of being a lawyer, and she tells Devalos, "Suffice it to say, I'm apparently either a little psychic or a little psycho." Caron, who created "Moonlighting" and the 1999 series "Now and Again," knows how to blend genres, and he must have realized that he needed to add some top notes of comedy to the perfume of self-seriousness that seems to cling to all those who are paranormally inclined. Too much of the humor involves lame byplay between Allison and Joe, and it's usually excruciating. When Allison, who has three children, tells Joe that she may be pregnant again, he says, "I think we're talking table for six," and Allison says, "Relax, maitre d'." Joe has an unacknowledged passive-aggressive attitude toward his wife's gifts and work habits. When she loses track of time at the office and comes home late, all he says is, "It's 10:30," or "It's 9:20." And then he smiles and says something supposedly cute about having sex, and you just wonder, When is this guy going to explode with rage? (If Haley Joel Osment were watching this series, he'd say, "I see divorced people.") Weber, a Brit, who played a broadly drawn cad in the recent HBO series "The Mind of the Married Man," goes to the ...