Scary Just Got Sexy.

It took me some time to get round to Supernatural, put off by the ridiculous ITV trailer, with that idiotic tagline. Did it really? How did I miss that?  Oh, wait. It’s for people who’ve never read Dracula. Or even Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Northanger Abbey. Or, for something more up-to-date, see Ginger Snaps, The Witches of Eastwick, or even Twilight. Simmering subtext is the name of the game, folks.

Supernatural concerns brothers Sam  and Dean Winchester, as they travel the States on a quest-cum-road trip to find their missing father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey’s Anatomy, PS, I Love You, Watchmen) and tackle the demon which left the brothers motherless. En route, they take up the family trade, ridding the world of evil one restless spirit at a time. Played by photogenic alumni of various grades of teen gloss, a quick primer in case you have difficulty telling the brothers apart:

Dean (Jensen Ackles), the stoic, growling elder brother. Distinguishable by his fondness for cock rock, his equally growly muscle car, and by the suspiciously perfect cupid’s bow.

Sam (Jared Padalecki), the introspective, intellectual floppy haired one, afflicted by loss, premonitions of doom, a dark birthright and an inferior pout.

As well as demons and vampires, the boys endure endless artfully grubby motel rooms, and a fractious relationship, which provides most of the humour. The leads founder when the whip-crack brisk plots require more emotional depth than carefully choreographed action, barefaced cheek, or po-faced heroics, but Supernatural is unafraid to tinker with the Monster-of-the-Week formula, or poke fun at itself.

By the second season, the writers experiment with non-linear storylines, and picking apart the absurdities of the show’s mythology, like when someone finally thinks to ask where vanquished spirits end up. There’s the spry, if glaringly obvious running gag that Winchesters are frequently mistaken for lovers thanks to their intimate living arrangements, bickering and over-compensating machismo. Even my creaky and sadly unreliable gaydar pinged a little when watching the show: is it Supernatural’s manly panic about pansy stuff like, uh, feelin’s? Because we all know that real badass,  hard drinkin’, skirt chasin’ ghost huntin’, demon wastin’ manly men only use consonants at the end of verbs when absolutely necessary.

Or is it a nod to the huge, weird and occasionally wonderful fan community that propels this show’s success?  Nah, it’s just odd-couple laughs and copper-bottomed entertainment, as in Mid Season Two episodes Tall Tales and Roadkill.

Supernatural takes sexuality off the back burner, and makes it the text, what with all the nubile young bodies cluttering almost every frame. I could work myself up into a proto-feminist lather about the constant drooling camerawork slithering over cleavages and thighs, the helpless screaming damsels, or lip glossed satanic hellcats who snare hapless men by moonlight to their deaths while chanting pig-Latin in parked cars, or girls without the sense not to do silly, slasher-flick things like head out alone into the woods on a misty night.

But that would be too much like hard work for Supernatural, and much less amusing than giggling over the occasional tumble; memorably, the tortured sex scene that takes place post-peril, in Heart, by a symbolically blazing fireplace. Watch out for lots of gratuitous, waxed male chest, as well as back scratching and coy biting. Y’know, ‘cos the girl’s an animal in the sack, with great nails, one who might tear your lungs out, Jim. No fraidy-cat subtext about the perils of female sexuality there at all. None.

Still, I got a kick out of the movie-nerd in-jokes – using aliases Dante and Landis during a werewolf episode, after the respective directors of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling, or guest turns to tickle horror fans, like The Exorcist’s Linda Blair as a sceptical small-town cop.

Scary most definitely is sexy, even if this doesn’t quite hit the spot. Just watch anything with Kevin Spacey being slippery, or John Malkovitch in Dangerous Liaisons. Or, um, Alan Rickman. But when taken with a pinch of salt tossed over one shoulder, and your brain in neutral, Supernatural serves up big, brash, dumb fun.

Meet Alison Dubois (Patricia Arquette, True Romance, Ed Wood), Phoenix law student, wife, mother and psychic.

A real Alison exists, as Medium’s opening titles insist, but she doesn’t begin as a crusader for justice, or if she does, it’s in a firmly earthbound manner, as a legal intern and general dogsbody for the District Attorney (Miguel Sandoval). The opening titles also undo some of the quiet, unflashy tone of the pilot, and the emphasis on Alison’s normality, with their sub X-Files music and kaleidoscopic primary colours that swirl into Rorschach ink blots, a crude effort to marry scientific study and new-agey stuff on auras and such, which does Medium no favours.

Alcohol dulls the voices of the dead but won’t quieten them; in a playful sequence, Alison sees the ghost of her father in law, who wonders what her husband sees in her. He’s an engineer and a rationalist, believes that Alison’s dreams are a reaction to stress, and as an experiment of sorts, he sends transcripts of Alison’s dreams to local law enforcement.

The show really begins when it turns out the dreams resemble actual crimes, in a way that piques the interest, and suspicion of investigators like the laconic Captain Push (an understated Arliss Howard), who becomes an ally. It’s a nifty set up, which establishes Alison and the central premise immediately.

Whether Alison is real, whether she really does possess psychic powers is irrelevant. Medium works because it maintains just the right amount of intrigue and scepticism, by making her visions oblique and imprecise. There needs to be a certain amount of interpretation, which opens Alison and her methods up to scrutiny.  

Also engaging is the contrast between the warm, chaotic domesticity of home life with her daughters, and the grim details of her work – I took an instant shine to Joe (Jake Weber), Alison’s dry, long-suffering husband, and Medium’s voice of calm common sense. He accepts her, even if he doesn’t quite accept her abilities. Here’s hoping that by keeping him supportive and in the background, he doesn’t remain a saintly spouse, as Weber manages to invest him with a personality, but needs a chance to flex some dramatic muscle.

Medium isn’t above the odd daft or unrealistically neat storyline, and a formula emerges very quickly. Allison senses something related to a crime, her husband responds with reassurance or a quip, she must contend with the disbelief and outright hostility of law enforcement, it comes good in the end and the bad guys are caught.

But Arquette makes Alison believable and sympathetic, her relationships feel real. She’s not a maverick, a genius, an expert or even a cop. She’s often as baffled by her visions as everyone else, and experiences self doubt¸ unlike unrepentant fraudster Patrick Jane of The Mentalist, a onetime psychic who also consults for the law. Also unlike any TV psychics you could name, who trade on claiming certainty. Alison’s leap into the belief her dreams are a force for good feels too pat, even a touch narcissistic, but Medium is not quite as fantastic, nor as glossy as the likes of Supernatural and Ghost Whisperer, Alison speaks, looks and dresses like someone you might know. Arquette’s imperfect prettiness and scream-queen wide eyes mean she can register the disgust, shock and fear of the layman in doing what she does.

The source of Alison’s ability is never satisfactorily explained, it’s as misty and shrouded as her visions, which vary in their point of view; murderer, victim, observer. I can’t help but feel a nagging irritation with this, and with Medium’s brand of instant, magic-wand TV policing; it diminishes the painstaking, puzzle-solving element and psychological insight of good crime fiction that appeals to nerds like me.

But, Medium makes a valid point about the importance of doubt.  While hysterical religious folk will maintain, in tiresome fashion, that the inability of science to explain everything invalidates it, and vice versa, Medium makes the sly suggestion that there’s room for spirituality, science, hokum and everything in between.