‘Medium’ both rare, well done

A TV series with a supernatural premise needs a healthy measure of workaday reality to keep it grounded. “The X-Files” had Scully and Mulder’s stillborn office romance to balance its alien abductions and byzantine conspiracies. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” had a heroine who cared as much about the prom and her history final as she did about skewering the undead.

“Medium,” NBC’s new hit drama based on the experiences of real-life psychic Allison DuBois, might, however, be the only supernatural series in which the main character’s ordinary life threatens to steal the show. Allison’s casework, mostly homicides she works on as a consultant for the local D.A., are reasonably diverting puzzles. One or two, such as a murder-suicide that prompts a vision of a creepy marriage counselor who smilingly urges a husband to shoot his wife, have delivered palpable chills.

But on TV, freaky serial killers, crooked cops and enigmatic crime scenes are a dime a dozen, however eerie the means of investigation. The beating heart of “Medium” is really Allison’s family life, particularly her marriage to Joe, played by Jake Weber. It makes you realize that on television, normality is the most exotic thing of all.

“You’re not like everybody else, and you know that,” a middle-age psychic housewife tells Allison, played by Patricia Arquette, in the first episode, when she’s still reluctant to accept her destiny. “Even among the special, you’re special.”

This fantasy surely lies behind the show’s appeal to millions of other middle-age or nearly middle-age housewives who worry that there might not be anything very special about them. “Medium,” you could say, is meant to be “Harry Potter” for soccer moms, a story about a nobody who turns out to have magical powers. Some of us who turn up for the spooks, though, have found ourselves sticking around for the show’s tender, careful, unusual attention to the rhythms of domestic intimacy.

Those prime-time parents

In most TV dramas, happily married parents are bland and sturdy supporting characters, he with the synthetic square-jawed good looks of a decommissioned superhero and she so inhumanly well groomed that she might have been given the once-over with industrial-grade burnishing equipment. When they fight, which is rarely, they’re somehow able to go straight to the big, underlying issues without getting sidetracked by the irritating small stuff that drives real couples nuts.

Allison and Joe, on the other hand, shamble around their suburban home in baggy T-shirts and flapping bathrobes, slopping jug milk into cereal bowls and shouting over the TV. They bicker about chores and spend a lot of time hustling their three daughters in and out of cars -- in one scene you actually see them wrangling a stroller into the trunk.

Allison is not above blowing up at Joe when she’s upset about something else, and Joe, an aerospace engineer, doesn’t want his colleagues to find out about his wife’s unscientific line of work.

But if this marriage isn’t idealized or fight-free, it’s also not dysfunctional. It’s a rock, and the confidence that Allison and Joe have in it shows in a dozen nuances of the actors’ performances, from the natural way they touch each other to their fractured, unstagy efforts to talk through what’s on their minds.

Weber (redeeming himself after his performance as a philanderer in HBO’s execrable “The Mind of the Married Man”) is good-looking rather than generically handsome, and his Joe has a sexy, feathery wit that seems custom-made to coax the stoic Arquette to life. Joe knows how to nudge his wife toward self-awareness without ever playing the scold. He: “Ever since you made the decision not to go to law school, I don’t know, you seem kinda -- “ She: “Bitchy? Cranky? Pissed off?” He, marveling: “You can read minds!”

There must be a manual somewhere for spouses of TV’s crusading crime-fighters that lists “Reproach him/her for neglecting the family” as the prime directive. If so, Joe hasn’t read it. When Joe and Allison learn that their 6-year-old, Bridget, plays alone all day at school, Allison flips: “This is my fault. I should have been out there, making play dates, arranging sleepovers....”

Joe steps in to ratchet down the hysteria -- when was the last time you saw a TV spouse do that? “Hold on,” he says, “can we not blow this all out of proportion? We’re talking about helping our 6-year-old make friends, not curing cancer. We can do this.”

And you believe they can, because while this marriage isn’t perfect, it works; “Medium” lets us see how. And on TV, that makes it pretty special.