NEW YORK — Patricia Arquette has gotten accustomed to the comments from fans who don’t seem to know that she’s still on television.
“I definitely have people every day grab me on the street saying, ‘When is your show coming back, why did they cancel it?’ ” said Arquette, who stars in “Medium,” NBC’s drama about a psychic who helps solve crimes while juggling the quotidian challenges of middle-class family life.
In fact, “Medium” returned to the air this month for its fifth season, which finds Arquette’s character, Allison DuBois, back assisting the Phoenix district attorney’s office, the fallout from her public exposure now largely subsided. The return of the series wasn’t accompanied by the fanfare of other midseason premieres such as “American Idol” or “Lost.” But the under-the-radar drama continues to draw a loyal fan base that gravitates to the program’s cleverly packed mysteries and unsentimental depiction of a marriage.
In its first three episodes this year, “Medium” averaged 8.5 million viewers, making it NBC’s sixth-most- watched scripted series of the season. The show has attracted 45 percent more viewers than NBC’s earlier Monday programming. It’s a solid performance for a drama that does not get a huge marketing boost or generate much chatter in the zeitgeist.
“I’m just grateful that we have a really dedicated, smart audience that’s really connected to the show,” Arquette said.
At its heart, “Medium” is not just a crime procedural but an intimate look at marriage and family dynamics, a rarity on network television. Much of the narrative centers on the relationship between Allison and her husband, Joe (Jake Weber), a matter-of-fact scientist who struggles to understand his wife’s supernatural powers. In between interpreting Allison’s dark dreams, they quarrel over mundane household responsibilities and parent three precocious daughters.
Last season, Allison and Joe’s bedtime conversations escalated into arguments about the costs of his new solar energy startup and his relationship with his new business partner (Kelly Preston). Having survived that test of their marriage, the fifth season finds the couple back on more solid ground emotionally and financially.
After the dramatic arcs of last season, executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron said that in Season 5, “The big challenge was figuring out how to get it back to a place where we were operating week to week. You don’t always want to have to be confronting a crisis.”
This season, smaller dramas consume Allison: the travails of her teenage daughter, Ariel (Sofia Vassilieva), and a lucrative job offer from the private sector.
