The Good

This idea is original enough to make this show something people want to watch.

The Bad

Sometimes this show felt like a retread of similarly themed shows.

Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as Melinda Gordon in Ghost Whisperer: The Complete First Season. The premise of this show is simple. Ghost walk the earth between two worlds and it is up to Melinda, once she realizes she has this power, to help them get to the next part of the afterlife. In doing so, she assists the ghosts in changing things from their past that they can no longer effect in the present. If this seems a little too hokey for you, that was my initial reaction but I really think that the Ghost Whisperer works. I think it plays on that part of us who has lost a loved one, and in our hopes that someday we might be able to communicate with them, we use Melinda as a surrogate for doing it for us.

Hewitt is very good in this 22 episode set that begins with her helping a solider ("Pilot"), then a suicidal comic ("Undead Comic"), but my favorite show in this set was "Demon Boy." This episode sees Hewitt going up against a very rotten boy who is terrorizing his family. The fact that she isn't dealing with a human being but an apparition, makes this show all the more eery. I also liked that there wasn't a large mishmash of style infused in this show, it just tells the stories and lets us experience them like only good TV can.

Features

Can You See Me? The First Season of Ghost Whisperer

A look at the first season of this show. While I didn't really think that a recap of this nature was mandatory, that's probably because I didn't get around to watching it until after I had screened the DVDs. This looks at the episodes, the characters, and the subject matter. It isn't comprehensive, even though it does try it's best to cover this show from essentially every angle. Worth a watch if you are a big fan of this show.

Second Sight: The Clairvoyants of Ghost Whisperer

I liked this section because it gave time to the actual clairvoyant, Mary Ann Winkowski, who inspired the Melinda Gordon character. As I myself am not a clairvoyant I can only guess what it must be like being one of those people, but this featurette seems to make the abilities that these people have highly accessible. While I think there is a certain quality of the unknown to their work, maybe there are certain things we shouldn't know?

Scare Tactics

A Tour of Grandview

Hewitt walks us through this set visit and I have to admit she looks great. No doubt excited about the new chapter that this show will create for her career, this featurette isn't much more than a puff piece, but I am sure that diehard fans who love the show (and Hewitt) will certainly not mind watching this. All in all, I don't think this told me anything I didn't already know, but it was still worth my time.

Deleted Scenes

Ghost Whisperer Mythology

This might be going a little overboard... a featurette that examines the opening title sequence? Perhaps if I was a bigger fan of this show I might get something out of it, but I think that showing all the work that went into this (while it is a pretty impressive sequence), just wasn't necessary. This show works on viewers because of what it does and doesn't reveal, I don't think I needed to have the magic of this segment made so available to me.

Blooper Reel

Audio Commentaries

Commentary tracks for this 6 disc set are on the following episodes: "Pilot," "Ghost, Interrupted," "Lost Boys and "Undead Comic." Since I liked the "Undead Comic" episode so much, I decided to listen to that track which is done by John Gray and Aisha Taylor. These two talk about the episode and what's going on in it, but I couldn't help wonder why Jennifer Love Hewitt didn't make an appearance on any of these commentary tracks. Yes, I know that John Gray did have a huge part behind the scenes, I just wished that I could have heard from the Ghost Whisperer herself.

Video

Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.85:1. This show managed to have a modern look but I don't think it is as sterile as other shows on TV. Hewitt has a look that really compliments this medium, and that mixed in with the warmness of this show's picture works very much to it's advantage. I liked that this show did it's best to simply tell the story as opposed to letting other things get in it's way. While there is nothing classical about Ghost Whisperer's presentation, it works because it relies on story more than anything else.

Audio

Dolby Digital 5.1. The audio on this show was as top notch as audio gets, I feel. Chalk it up to the actors not whispering their way through scenes? Maybe there was a lot of looping? For whatever reason, this show simply sounded good. It doesn't mess around too much with the soundtrack, yet it does keep things on a pretty creepy level. There is just enough smoke and mirrors to make the audio not call attention to itself.

Package

A ravenous image of Hewitt graces this front cover as mystery looms all around her. The back portion features pictures from the show, a description of what Ghost Whisperer is about, a Special Features listing, and a technical specs section. All 6 discs that make up this set are neatly housed inside this packaging which contains more artwork from the show, as well as information on each episode, and where to find the aforementioned Special Features. Paramount has kept things pretty economical, I just wondered if it couldn't have made the packaging less bulky.

Final Word

I really think that Jennifer Love Hewitt is coming into her own as an actress. The fact that she took on a somewhat darker role that could define her career, speaks volumes. She probably could have very easily done romantic comedies, or Garfield movies for the rest of her life, but she has infused the Melinda Gordon character with a personable appeal that really works in her favor. The fact that she's someone that probably everyone wants to look at for an hour a week doesn't hurt. Still, she brings an intelligence and empathy to this role and once again, I think she allows some viewers to maybe exorcise their own demons as they watch it.

While I had never seen an episode before MovieWeb gave it to me to review, I can safely say I am glad to have discovered Ghost Whisperer: The Complete First Season for myself.

Ghost Whisperer was released .