TV viewers are more in love with the supernatural than ever before. Sure, there have been incredibly popular otherworldly series in the past from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files, but right now the genre where things go bump in the night seems to be at the peak of its popularity. Ghost Hunters is breaking records for The Sci-Fi Channel, The Ghost Whisperer continues to hit for CBS, and Supernatural has turned into a steady performer for The CW. Those fictional series combined with a slate of new shows like Paranormal State and the endless reruns of shows like Haunted History could lead one to believe that the undead are the biggest stars on television. One of the most consistently interesting but bizarrely underrated of the sub-genre is NBC's Medium, a series that garners the occasional acclaim for star Patricia Arquette but doesn't get nearly the press of most of its competition. It's the reliable workhorse of the supernatural genre, a show that rarely blows your mind but just as rarely disappoints. It's a solid hour of entertainment nearly every episode and with the state of television mid-strike, a consistent, NEW hour of television like Medium may soon be as hard to find as proof of the afterlife.

Season four of Medium opens with two typically good episodes called "And Then" and "But For the Grace of God." It seems clear from this pair that this season will focus heavily on what's happening in the DuBois household as much as what's being telegraphed to Allison from the other side. In case you're unfamiliar, Patricia Arquette plays Allison DuBois, a woman who has visions or dreams of unfolding traumatic events. The cops used to use her to help find kidnap victims or serial killers but her life kind of fell apart at the end of season three and the new season finds her and her husband Joe unemployed, dealing with a troubled teenage daughter, and visions that she knows could help someone if she could find a person to take her seriously.

The main credit for the success of Medium has been mostly awarded to Patricia Arquette. While it's true that the actress rarely hits a wrong note in this complex character, there are other elements at play in why Medium has become a modest hit and a relatively acclaimed show. First, most shows are only as good as their worst ensemble player and everyone on Medium works very well together, especially Jake Weber and Sofia Vassilieva, one of the few teenage girl characters on television that feels both believable and isn't just annoying. It doesn't hurt that they've added the great Anjelica Huston for an arc to start the new season.

Second, Medium has always impressed with how far its willing to go into the dark side. Some episodes of Medium, especially in the first season when it wasn't quite so family-oriented, were very dark and were actually trying to scare the audience. Even this season's first two episodes feature some incredibly dark twists and turns, both of which have to do with the jeopardy of childhood. Medium isn't afraid to be a dark, violent show and that's to its credit. It could have easily been closer to Touched by An Angel, but it chose to look at the darker side of humanity and the best episodes in the history of the show have done that very well.

The first two episodes of the new season of Medium are good, but it does worry me a little bit that the DuBois family has become a bit too much of a focal point. When it became clear early on that the second episode would focus a lot on Ariel, I worried that Medium was devolving into a family drama more than a supernatural one, but the writers and actors actually pulled it off. It's a tightrope, balancing the dark tones of the concept with the family dynamic at its core. Medium continues to walk it and should be a nice oasis in the desert of reality TV that has grown around the writer's strike.