- LOS ANGELES --- "I
see dead people," Haley Joel Osment famously said in the film "The
Sixth Sense." If the current crop of similarly themed television series
is any indication, so do a lot of folks.
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- In "Medium," "The Ghost Whisperer"
and "The Dead Zone" "gifted" characters routinely aid
the restless spirits of the deceased. And more shows are on the way: BBC
America just introduced "Afterlife." Glenn Gordon Caron, executive
producer of "Medium," is developing a romantic drama about a
dead young woman who returns to life to help people. And for midseason
NBC is bringing "Raines," starring Jeff Goldblum as a cop who
talks to the ghosts of murder victims.
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- In almost all of these shows, those who have died are
unable to pass over until they communicate something of vital importance
to the living. On "Medium" the dead help a psychic, Allison DuBois
(Patricia Arquette), solve crimes for the Phoenix district attorney's office.
On "Ghost Whisperer" they urgently impart - through an antiques
dealer played by Jennifer Love Hewitt - messages of solace, unrequited
love or belated support to those left behind. And on "The Dead Zone,"
news from the otherworld is conveyed by Anthony Michael Hall as the uneasy
clairvoyant. It seems, at least on television, that the dearly departed
have never been so reluctant to depart.
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- None of this is new of course: ghosts have been chatting
up people (and vice versa) for years on television, in comedies like "Topper"
and in "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," not to mention "Casper."
But today's paranormal shows aren't played for laughs; they're serious,
almost painfully earnest dramas. Certainly they speak in personal, easily
relatable ways about life-and-death issues. But is there anything more
to this than a hot trend that draws impressive ratings?
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- My interest is admittedly professional. As a former Hollywood
writer who is now a psychotherapist working with patients in the arts,
I regularly talk with live people who write about characters who talk to
dead people. Based on what writers and producers tell me in sessions, I've
noticed they feel an urgent need to use the small screen to resolve the
big questions we all grapple with. For example, one writer-patient cheerfully
summed up the genre's appeal: Death is a bummer.
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- Perhaps this requires interpretation. Like many of the
creators and writers of these shows, the patient is a baby boomer who,
along with most of his generation, is alarmed at the prospect of actually
dying some day. Though this concern isn't unique to people who came of
age in the '60s and '70s, we do seem to be in a state of some resistance
about our own mortality. It's obvious why the paranormal fascinates these
writers: shows about talking to the dead posit, by definition, that there's
a life after this one, that there's a continuity of being.
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- That's why, this same writer said, his show is a hit.
Every week it says to the audience: "Don't worry, death isn't really
death. It isn't the end of anything."
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- That may imply just another variation on past hits like
"Highway to Heaven" or "Touched by an Angel," in which
heavenly visitors bring divine wisdom and understanding. But there is a
crucial difference (and it's not just that, as one of my more cynical writer-patients
put it, "Angels have been done to death"). The new heroes are
mortal, prey to the same emotional struggles as the rest of us, and so
able to relate on a human level with the troubled ghosts they - and only
they - can see.
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- That was part of the appeal for a writer-patient on her
second season with one of these shows. Though she disguised identifying
details in her script, it was written "to say all the things I wish
I'd said to my mother when she was alive," she confided. "And
I guess my hopes for what she'd say back to me."
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- I hear such sentiments from writers all the time, and
not just those who work on these shows. Like many in their audience they're
taken with the pop-therapy concept of "closure," the hope that
a final encounter can put a conflicted relationship to rest. How better
to do this than actually to talk to those who have died, yet still exist,
and who need to resolve unfinished business on this plane before they can
move on to the next? One of the central conceits of these shows is that
the living and the dead can have a final, healing conversation. On "Medium"
Allison DuBois has helped a teenager come to terms with the suicide of
his mother; on this season's opening episode Allison and her dead ex-lover
had to find closure of their own.
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- This restorative outcome relies on a narrative conceit
that stretches from ancient Greek tragedies to modern dramas like Thornton
Wilder's "Our Town," namely the belief that the lingering dead
have mellowed, grown wise or finally seen the error of their ways. They've
attained a new understanding, which the medium has to convey to the surviving
loved ones.
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- Take a recent episode of "The Ghost Whisperer":
Sonia Braga played a mother whose posthumous acceptance of her son's desire
to box helped bridge the bitter estrangement between the boy and his father.
Shows featuring the professional medium John Edward and his many imitators
serve a comparable purpose: communication with the dead is the vehicle
by which new consolations and revelations are attained, for the benefit
of the living.
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- What all these shows have in common is the promise that,
even if only in the afterlife, there will come wisdom and contentment.
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- A producer patient is developing yet another pilot script
along these lines, and he used his conflicted feelings about his wayward
grandfather as his inspiration. Con man, crook, the old man was just horrible
to his family. Yet the producer loved him so much that he visualized his
dead relative sitting calmly in a chair, watching us down here. The dead
man realizes his life was a mess, that it brought him nothing but grief.
He just shakes his head at the foolish, selfish things living people do.
And he wants to help.
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- It doesn't take a producer or a writer to entertain such
fancies. Like anyone might, my patient used his imagination to envision
his grandfather living on in some way after death and becoming a better
man. But another patient of mine, who has written for these shows, sees
a simpler explanation: "It's what we have instead of God," he
said. "Or, at least, it's what I have."
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- He's not alone. Most of the television writers I've worked
with are at best ambivalent about traditional notions of God. "Medium,"
"The Ghost Whisperer" and their ilk offer the comforting assurance
that there is a heavenlike realm after death, without requiring belief
in a specific faith or conception of God. Even the fact that the dead are
never shown arriving at some glittering, cloud-filled destination, but
rather simply vanish from the screen, gives the viewer a lot of latitude
in imagining where they went.
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- But the implication is clear: There's something out there
- a force beyond our understanding - that gives meaning to our lives, and
our deaths.
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- Maybe it's that simple, after all. If faith is, as the
theologian Paul Tillich maintains, man's ultimate concern, then the reason
these shows are flourishing seems suddenly obvious. They're about what
storytelling has always been about: hope.
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- Dennis Palumbo, formerly a screenwriter whose credits
include "My Favorite Year" and "Welcome Back, Kotter,"
is now a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.
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- http:nytimes.com
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