ALLISON DuBois sees dead people. She also sees live ones. And it's the live ones who cause most of the trouble.
"Live people are much trickier," says the Arizona psychic, whose life forms the basis for Patricia Arquette's hit TV series Medium.
"They are very hard. When people come up to me, they're looking me in the eye, searching for something -- waiting for me to unravel a mystery for them about, you know, a child that was murdered or a father who committed suicide when they were two.
"It's very difficult to look those people in the eye and send them away with anything less than what they're expecting.
"Most of the time, if I'm out somewhere and I see someone who is accompanied (by a spirit), I will not say anything. You have to be very careful about this. You can't just barge in on people and say, 'I can see your spouse with you'."
Since Medium premiered, DuBois, 34, has been faced with more desperate, pleading faces than ever before -- week after week viewers watch her character tracking down killers and passing on messages from the dead.
"It does mean that a lot more people tend to see you as their last hope," she says.
"I feel badly that I can't replicate myself so I can get to more people, but I have 200 cases on my desk right now . . . I can't skip people who've been waiting for months. It wouldn't be fair."
As well as trying to help individuals and police who ask for help -- as Arquette's character does on the show -- DuBois consults on jury selections where her ability to "read" people helps pick sympathetic jurors.
She also consults on Medium and was keen from the beginning to portray herself as an ordinary working wife and mother as well as the crime-fighting spiritualist.
"It was one of the things I said to the producers in the beginning. I said, 'You can't just take the idea of what I am and spin it off into episodes. It has to ring true'," she says.
"I'm trying to tell people you can be normal. You don't have to have a crystal ball and 30 cats to do what I do. I eat junk food and I drink soda and I spend a lot of time wondering what to have for dinner."
DuBois was reassured when creator and writer Glenn Caron told her that mediumship would be secondary in the show.
"He said, 'Relationships, that's what the show's going to be about'. I liked that."
DuBois also is proud that most of the emotion and vulnerability in the series belongs to her character, rather than to those she helps.
"When they called me and said, 'We'd like to make a show based on your life', I said, 'Well, I don't want to do a show like Crossing Over or anything because these readings are very private and it's nothing I really want to put on display'," DuBois says, referring to the popular series in which psychic John Edward "connects" members of a studio audience with dead loved ones.
"I mean he's a very nice man and very good at what he does, but I don't think television and what we do are necessarily friends. It puts people's real emotions on display for entertainment and that was an issue for me."
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/ ... 22,00.html
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