Anybody gotta towel......

by Jane Clifton

GOODY-TWO-SHOES: Jennifer Love-Hewitt is as wet as they come as Melinda in Ghost Whisperer.

It's probably because the heroine of Ghost Whisperer, back on TV2 on Monday, is getting wetter and soppier by the episode that the producers have introduced a couple of saltier regulars to the cast – and not before time.

Melinda, played by the improbably pretty Jennifer Love-Hewitt, is so milk-and-water goody-two-shoesy, it's a great mystery that the spirit world didn't choose someone with a bit more go about them to solve its problems.

Melinda counsels ghosts – that's the plot of this American programme. In this life, it takes a bit of gumption to settle problems that go back years, let alone generations, and one assumes it's the same in the afterlife – specially when half one's clientele can't actually see the other half, because they're dead. And when you first have to convince the living that you can actually see the dead, rather than be carted off to the loony bin.

Frankly, you'd need to be a cast- iron bossy boots to do this job in real life. But sweet little Melinda seems to manage it simply by empathising and having a never-fail auto-dew system going with her eyes. Sometimes she throws in a spaniel head-tilt of extra compassion. This seems to persuade ornery spirits to "cross over" and their relatives to reconcile themselves to their loss. As they say in the cliches, it's all about closure.

As the programme returns for its second season, Melinda has had a bulk order – a sudden spate of ghosts from an air crash in her picturesque little town. If that wasn't tricky enough, there's a Christopher Walken-like figure stalking about in a broad-brimmed hat, who seems to be in competition with Melinda. Only he's working for The Other Side.

Blessedly, concepts like God and the Devil aren't made explicit on Ghost Whisperer, but you get the idea. She's working for the "light" side of things, and the hat guy, by the name of Romano, is working for the dark side. He is the deceased leader of a 1920s Algerian cult, who has found a new career in gathering souls for eternity's bad guys.

Why Algerian? Who knows? Perhaps in US TV land, everything sinister these days has to be Middle Eastern in origin.

The contrivance here is a whole lot less imaginative and suspenseful than the same sort of stuff was when Charmed used to do it.

On Ghost Whisperer, there's no zapping and spell-casting, but, rather less convincingly, a lot of soul- stirring talk as good wrestles with evil.

Complicating the picture is the fact that Andrea, Melinda's loveable business partner in the antique shop she runs when not sorting out the hereafter, has died but not crossed over, and Romano is trying to get her soul.

What happens is too silly to rehearse here. But the upside is that the pithy satirical actor Jay Mohr has joined the show as a sceptical university professor, who specialises in demystifying superstition and occult fancies. Quite what Mohr is doing in such a soppy show is a matter for his agent to ponder with shame, but at least he adds a little parodic mischief to the mealy- mouthings. He is rude and manages his life according to how far away he is from one junk food fix to the next. He also has some quite sparkly lines. He will make this show more bearable.

And, as Melinda is happily married to a suitably soppy guy, there will be no tiresome love interest between them.

Also welcome will be Camryn Manheim, as Melinda's new sidekick, Delia, starting in the next couple of episodes.

Manheim, the actress who played stroppy Elinor Frutt in The Practice, does not do soppy roles these days, and should be a good foil for Melinda's sugary ways.

That is, if you can be bothered watching, and that's a big if. The best things about Ghost Whisperer are Jennifer Love-Hewitt's beautiful face, which is so lovely, it's tempting to forgive her for Melinda's wetness, and the gorgeousness of the contents of the antique shop which serves as a backdrop for much of the action.

If I had a shop full of stuff like that, I'd tell the undead to naff off and haunt some other medium so I could enjoy wafting about among the finery.

Story: © 2007 Fairfax New Zealand Limited . All Rights Reserved.
Image: © 2005 ABC Studios - a Walt Disney Company and CBS Studios Inc. - a CBS Corporation company. All Rights Reserved.