The triumph......

by Verne Gay

Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has a gift you likely don't have: She can see dead people, or rather their tormented "earthbound spirits [and] just some of them are here longer than others ..."

This all began as a kid, when her acutely strange grandmother (yup, same gift) would take her to funerals, for example, to pass messages between the recently deceased and the living. At one, a man she is seated next to tells her, "I had to go so quickly I didn't tell [my wife] how much I loved her.... She really needs to hear that now. Will you give her the message?"

Fast forward to adulthood, and the little girl is now looking just fabulous - as only Love Hewitt can - and informs her husband that "places aren't haunted - people are haunted." You are correct: There's a voluminous amount of bunkum on display here, but bunkum has only rarely looked so spookily stylish on prime-time TV.

"Whisperer," in fact, is a mini-triumph of style over substance (of which there is almost none). It is also manipulative, and perhaps egregiously so, simply because there is no substance. In tonight's pilot, for example, Gordon directs the poltergeist of a soldier killed in Vietnam to his living son. The scenes between father and son are touching, and meant to be, but Vietnam was a real war, and there were real fathers who never saw their real sons again. So is this fair game in the context of a prime-time drama? Your call.

Story: © 2005 Newsday Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Image: © 2005 Touchstone Television LLC. - a Walt Disney Company. All Rights Reserved.