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.