You don't have to be psychic to know NBC's peacock has begun to molt. The Apprentice 2 disappointed, Joey is far from a Friends-sized hit and newcomers Hawaii and LAX dropped off radar screens faster than the castaways on Lost. The network's greatest success in the past six months has been that its animated Father of the Pride wasn't quite the unmitigated disaster many had predicted. Not exactly something you can brag about to your bosses at General Electric.

Across the street, CBS keeps cloning CSIs while maintaining its Survivor franchise. ABC, the Cinderella network of 2004, has found its glass slipper in the form of dual dynamos Lost and Desperate Housewives. Even Fox has American Idol and 24 to rely on in January.

And you're NBC, the once great titan of primetime and you're countering with ... Apprentice 3? And Sylvester Stallone's boxing reality series The Contender? Sure, maybe it can muster some momentum by arriving on the heels of Clint Eastwood's Oscar contender, Million Dollar Baby, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Which brings us to two of the network's other hopes for midseason -- both of which debut next week.

Medium (Monday at 11 p.m.) is a Sixth Sense wannabe starring Patricia Arquette who sees -- you guessed it -- dead people. Committed (Tuesday at 10:30 p.m.) is a New York-based comedy that wants to be the next Seinfeld. (Ignoring the fact that the next Seinfeld is actually Arrested Development.)

Arquette has always been a fascinating performer -- not so much because she's a great actress (she isn't), but because she always seems to be ... elsewhere. It's there in True Romance, where she played a busty blond ditz, and it's here in Medium, where she's a mother of three and legal intern besieged by visions from beyond the grave.

The new role, you'd think, would be a perfect fit, and maybe it is, but it's hard to tell from a pilot episode that's as weakly realized as this.

Medium is from Glenn Gordon Caron, who created the '80s hit Moonlighting, but here he's all over the astral plane with seemingly no idea what he wants to achieve. It seems to want to take Arquette's character seriously -- yet never convinces us that this is someone who's been dealing with supernatural visions from an early age. She seems less tormented than perplexed -- as if her second sight was a birthmark she's not sure she should have removed.

Worse, Medium isn't frightening enough to work as a thriller and it's not odd or clever enough to qualify as a wonky diversion.

Neither is Committed -- a Big Apple-based sitcom about two kooks who fall in love. Simple enough premise -- but the producers pile on the eccentricities until all the quirkiness just becomes shrill. It's not enough that Nate (Josh Cooke) is a neurotic record-store employee, so he also hails from a family of dysfunctional geniuses (shades of the Royal Tennenbaums). And it's not enough his newfound love Marni (Jennifer Finnigan) is a loopy occupational therapist so she also shares her apartment with a dying clown (Tom Poston) who lives in the closet. It's all very frenetic and self-aware and artificial -- a cuckoo's nest audiences should really fly away from.