Monica The Medium: What good is talking to dead people if you're vapid and have nothing to say?

Becoming Us, ABC Family's reality show about several families dealing with transgendered relatives, broke new ground in cable television. So does Monica The Medium, but in quite another way. Starring Monica Ten-Kate, a Penn State student who shares an off-campus house with several roommates and  purports to talk to the dead, which is like presenting a "reality" show about a Martian or a talking horse.  If you want your mind blown, watch Penn & Teller: Fool Us.  If you prefer the manipulative, deceptive, and painfully insincere, here's the show for you.

Monica's roommates are the sort of vapid, privileged white girls we've met a million times on MTV, which often makes Monica The Medium feel like The Real World: Supernatural.  The girls look for boyfriends, go to parties, dish about makeup and dresses, and leave their apartment a mess.  About the only thing you don't see them worry about is getting an education and eventually, a job, since they all clearly have rich parents to go home to.  Monica, meanwhile, is trying to run her psychic business out of their campus "housing," which is quite a bit nicer and much bigger than the middle-class brownstone I grew up in.

We all know how so-called psychics work and Monica's no different:   Start with vague questions, like "do you have a relative whose name starts with a J or a G?  Oh, your dad's middle name was John?  Is he dead?"   Monica's first "reading," done over a game of beer pong, is heavily edited, so we only see the questions that get positive answers, not the vague, open-ended questions that "psychics" use in a cold reading. 

In another scene, Monica does a reading for a young couple who turn out to be a girl whose father was killed in a car accident by the sister of the young man with her.   There's only one problem: The young man lets it slip that he was informed "we'd have this opportunity to get a reading," which means the couple was approached by the show's producers and interviewed at length before the reading. Quel surprise!

Monica, for her part, seems quite sure she's actually hearing the voices of the dead, almost always instantly and with no trouble connecting with the spirit world. If anything, she has so much psychic information flooding her brain that she needs to take notes to make sense of it.   Most mediums at least try to make their seances look "real" (and therefore somewhat difficult;) Monica chats with ghosts as easily as her ditzy roommates text back and forth.  She's either a consummate fraud or an exploited nut case, but either possibility makes Monica The Medium one of the most despicable programs on cable.  (Don't worry, there are worse on network television, like those shows that offer cash rewards for contestants to treat their loved ones abominably.)  For ABC Family to air this show, after its sterling record of family dramas that sympathetically portray the plight of the mentally handicapped, the deaf, the transgendered, gay teens, and foster children, seems horribly jaded and crass.