So, which is stranger — talking to dead people or having your life portrayed on a TV series?
"Seeing my life on TV," Allison DuBois said with a laugh.
DuBois says she's been seeing and talking to the dead since she was a young girl. And, as an adult, she's helped police solve a wide variety of crimes.
Now her life forms the basis for "Medium," a surprisingly good new NBC series that debuts tonight at 9 on Ch. 5. Patricia Arquette stars as DuBois, an Arizona woman who would really rather be a lawyer than a psychic but who can't stop seeing crimes and is compelled to help solve them.
"It was very profound for me when I watched the pilot for the first time because I felt like I've had this whole world inside of me that other people didn't understand. And to see it laid out in front of my eyes — I've never had to look at myself before in that respect," DuBois said in a telephone interview with TV critics. "It was very moving for me to finally feel understood on many levels."
Which is not to say that "Medium" is an exact re-creation of her life.
"The way I'm playing Allison, which is a little different than the real Allison, is I'm more self-doubting and skeptical of myself," Arquette said.
"Right," DuBois agreed.
As written by executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron ("Moonlighting"), the fictional Allison is a mixture of fragility and toughness.
"My character is kind of balancing this wanting to be a soccer mom and having a happy family and this relationship and having this macabre, bizarre, dark, gory other life that's always butting its head in," Arquette said, with DuBois once again instantly agreeing. (Both Dubois and her TV counterpart have three young daughters — the oldest of the fictional daughters is played by Sofia Vassilieva, the Utah girl who starred in the two "Eloise" TV movies.)
In real life and in the pilot, Allison and her aerospace engineer husband, Joe (Jake Weber), fax information she's "seen" to various police agencies "to prove to myself that I wasn't doing it. Because I was skeptical that it could be done."
But she hears from skeptical authorities in Texas, who bring her in on a case.
"The pilot episode was very accurate to my life," DuBois said. "It was the moment when I went from being in school to being a prosecutor to having to make a choice between doing that or doing what I could do with law enforcement to help other people.
"The Texas Rangers' (investigation) was the first case that I worked, but I don't know if they'll admit that because law enforcement can be funny about that," she said, adding that Caron "did change some things" but "The things you would think couldn't be true, happened."
DuBois is, for the most part, accustomed to her psychic abilities, although seeing murders can obviously be unsettling.
"I do see them like movies, playing front to back, which can be very disturbing because you can be in a grocery store and start seeing somebody's mother die," she said. "I have no control over what I'm seeing and sometimes I really wish I did."
Not that she expects everyone to believe that she sees dead people and can visualize murders through the eyes of the killers.
"I actually encourage people to be skeptical. And I think you can be skeptical and watch this," DuBois said. "I just hope that people who are skeptical and watch this can keep somewhat of an open mind, even if they're not a firm believer that they can entertain the idea that it's possible."
"I think you can be a full-on skeptic and still enjoy it," Arquette said.
What might be hardest thing to overcome is skepticism about a weekly show with a psychic who solves crimes, which sounds like something we've seen before dozens of times. But, lo and behold, this is the best show NBC has put on in a year — it's so well done it will grab you and draw you in.
Which proves that even the least-original sounding idea can turn into a good TV show if it's done well. And "Medium" is well done.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com