The other fun part is that Melinda tangles with some ghost hunters (who are probably frauds). But boy do they have a cool vehicle.

We wonder what's going to happen when they confront the real deal. What we do remember is that when Melinda encounter a fake medium in "Unhappy Medium" it turned out he was a lot more helpful than she expected and they learned a lot from each other. We would expect no less from this episode.

Read more about "Ghost Busted" in the MelindaVerse Episodes section.

Comments?

The first is an old one but interesting. It suggests that far from driving viewers away from GW, Jim's death has succeeded in making the show more popular.

Just like a fine wine, the beautiful Melinda Gordon just keeps getting better with age. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the MelindaVerse web site. Since we started almost a year and a half ago, the site has grown like topsy turvy and it is showing its age. So it’s time for some cosmetic surgery -- a little botox here, a tummy tuck there and an eyelid lift somewhere else. All to make it easier for you to use the site.

When we created the site at the beginning of season two, we did not know what would be the focus of interest. And as we kept adding things, it became clear that some of our original topics had expanded greatly while others just sat there. For example, we had a major topic “Credits” which hardly had any changes while “News & Views” which had lots of entries was buried on the main page. Something had to be done.

So our first change to the site is a major reorganization. The new design has five major areas: the MelindaVerse, People, Episodes, News & Views, and Miscellaneous. The MV main page has been simplified and many pages have been moved to create what we believe is a more logical arrangement. For example, the cast, crew, and writer/director topics have been consolidated into a single major topic, “People.” Also, many of the things like the glossary and time line which used to be attached to the main page have been moved to the Miscellaneous topic.

We hope you find these changes make the site more usable. In any endeavor like this there are sure to be a few errors introduced. Please notify Chief Rodney of any you find.

Our next change to the site will be to improve some of the pages that have become cumbersome to use like the promotional images and the episode list. We are also working with Chief Rodney to improve the overall look of the site. As always, all your comments are gladly accepted.

Recently we e-mailed a good friend our recommendations on what to look for on the season 1 and 2 DVD sets. It occurred to us that this list might be of interest to other fans of the MelindaVerse so here it is.

Season 1:

• The commentary by Creator John Gray and Executive Producer Kim Moses for the “Pilot” episode has a lot of information about how they wanted to do the series.
• The commentary by Executive Producers Ian Sander and Kim Moses for “Ghost, Interrupted” is also good. They are Sander/Moses Productions and also married to each other.
• The commentary by Ian Sander and David Conrad (Jim Clancy) for “Lost Boys.”
• The scene in “Friendly Neighborhood Ghost” where Mel is caught snooping in his garage by new neighbor Todd Darger. He grabs her around the neck for protection from the ghost grandfather but we suspect the two actors probably had to shoot the scene several times to get the emotions right. That’s because Todd is played by Ross McCall – the Scot Jennifer recently announced her engagement to. Nobody’s talking but we suspect it was love at first hug since she was exclusively dating him soon after this episode was shot.
• Special Features: Be sure to check out “Can You See Me? The First Season of Ghost Whisperer.” A good introduction into how the show was created.
• Special Features: Ghost Whisperer Mythology. This is all about the title sequence – how it was made and what it means.
• 
  

Season 2:

• The commentary by John Gray and Kim Moses for “Love Never Dies.” (We were not as impressed with the other commentaries for the second season but that may just be because we have been following the show so closely.)
• Special Features: A Conversation With The Living. This is the main place you get to hear from the cast members.
• Special Features; Melinda’s Closet. It was just as we thought – It takes most of the second floor of their house to hold all those different outfits Mel wears! A good discussion of Melinda’s wardrobe by costume designer Joseph Porro, Jennifer, Kim Moses and a few others.
• Special Features; Jennifer Love Hewitt Speed Painting Video. A visual treat where you get to see a time-lapse version of the graphic designer creating a realistic portrait of Mel.

All the episodes are great, IMHO, but The Bears just wanted to call your attention to some things that stood out for us when we first looked.

Well, who would have thought our favorite show would get this far. Fifty episodes of Ghost Whisperer have now been broadcast with the showing of the episode “The Weight of What Was.” This puts the producers on the downside of creating 100 episodes which is the magic number supposedly necessary for a successful run in syndication. We’d take this opportunity to share some of our pondering about the show. In particular, we’d like to note how this show made it not because it got great press but in-spite of it. It is clearly a show that succeeded because of its loyal fans.

Ghost Whisperer came to the airwaves with very little media support beyond the publicity the network and producers could muster. While the initial reviews were relatively positive (probably because of select seeding of the pilot to those critics the producers thought would like it), later reviews dismissed the show with vengeance. It was called a “namby-pamby, touchy-feely version” of the other supernatural shows. The plots were supposed to be “unoriginal” and “repetitive.” The look was too “plastic” and the ghosts not spooky. More than one said “the show is essentially a rip-off of Medium.” Finally they accused the show of having a “muddled” sense of the afterlife. CBS was criticized for replacing the fine family-friendly drama Joan of Arcadia (which had been losing ratings all of its last season) with a “piece of fluff.” Criticisms like this led to the odds-makers predicting GW was a “3/1 heavy favorite to be the first fall TV show cancelled…” (Obviously those who went against the line did very, very well.)

The critic’s attacks on Jennifer Love Hewitt were, if anything, even worse. She was dismissed as a teenage has-been with no talent, “a poor actress who comes off as phony and insincere.” They compared her talent as an actress unfavorably with Amber Tamblyn of of the cancelled Joan or the Emmy-winning Patricia Arquette of Medium. Many could not resist saying she wasn’t even the show’s star at all, playing third place to her breasts. One even asked why “the lovely and talented actress” Aisha Tyler even agree to be on such a show? In the latter case, that critic got his wish when Tyler left the show after the end of the first season.

So what’s going on here? Despite the writers’ strike (we hope) it looks like there might well be many more seasons of Ghost Whisperer to come. So are we fans without good taste or are these critics clueless.

The Bears think several things are at work here. The first is the notion of a “received idea” where the critic simply accepts an opinion as true without questioning it. For example, Ghost Whisperer and Medium are both about women who see spirits so therefore GW is a copy of Medium. If you have watched both shows, you know that women who see spirits are the only two things the shows have in common. Otherwise they are completely different. One show is essentially a police procedural with a supernatural twist while the other might well be called a psychodrama about grief resolution. Another received idea is that because Jennifer Love Hewitt was a big teenage star and is now a very attractive woman, she cannot act. Well, we would point out Jennifer has received two Best Actress awards for the show which we take to mean she can act very well.

Another assumption these critics seem to be making is that there is “only one way” to make a show about the supernatural or that there is a single way ghosts act or that all mediums work the same way. So they claim that GW is “wrong” about one or more of these things. Anyone who has read more than a few books or watched more than a few shows about any of these topics knows there are many variations for each. So we think is extremely unfair to criticize a show for getting these things “wrong.” Instead, a good critic would accept the show’s frame of reference and determine if it did a good job within that frame.

As to Ghost Whisperer episodes being repetitive, what the critics seem to be saying is that every episode fits into a pattern. News Flash! All episodic television shows fit into a pattern because that’s the way viewers can understand them. Detective shows have a pattern: a crime is committed, the detective finds some clues, things go off track, things start to fall into place, and, finally, the crime is solved. The same goes for police procedurals, medical dramas, and lawyer dramas. The point is not that the general framework of a given genre remains constant but the details of how a show plays out within that framework. The good shows make this interesting. Yes, Melinda nearly always crosses the spirit over. But the detective nearly always solves the crime and the doctor nearly always cures the patient. What matters is how we get from the problem to the solution.

Finally, it looks to us like a lot of critics seem to look at what “the important critics” are saying about a given show and agree with that -- a sort of pack mentality. They don’t have an opinion of their own, they just go with the accepted view. We don’t know what to say about this other than to note it is fairly common in many parts of the media. You can observe it happening in political, business, and sports commentary. Everybody cheers for the so-called winner and jeers the so-called loser. So ultimate who are the winners and losers become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

We are just very happy that we fans of Ghost Whisperer judged the show for itself instead of paying attention to the large amount of negative criticism. Because of this, we have the delightful Melinda, her family, and her friends bringing a wonderful show to our homes every Friday evening.

Boy, has it been a busy week or so here at The Bears’ cave! Everything seemed to happen at once. Getting the new forum up and running, letting all our friends know about it, handling all the new information about Ghost Whisperer coming out, and, of course, watching and re-watching the season three premiere (not to mention trying to take a peek at the season 2 DVD set). We are exhausted.

So maybe you can understand why The Bears and Chief Rodney have fallen more than a little bit behind on keeping the MelindaVerse.com up-to-date. But we are starting to catch up and should be getting more pictures and episode information up soon – just keep checking.

“The Underneath” was a great kickoff episode for the new season. John Gray and his colleagues introduced their new, darker mythology of Grandview while at the same time giving us a heart-warming story of a young woman who had lost her parents which – after a journey through some very dark places – ended with a classic GW porch scene and cross over that really brought tears to these old bear eyes. Plus we learned a lot more about the difficult situation between Melinda and her mother (thanks to the return of that great actress Anne Archer). The summer break must have been good to Jennifer Love Hewitt because her Melinda character, if anything, is even more heartwarming and beautiful than ever.

Here’s to a great season three of Ghost Whisperer!