Patricia Arquette and Glenn Gordon Caron talk "Medium."

When “Medium” executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron put Allison DuBois (Patricia Arquette) into a coma, he knew there was a chance the cliffhanger would never be resolved.
“It was sort of me being a wiseguy, frankly,” he said at a Q&A session for his new network, CBS. “I wasn’t certain that we’d be picked up by NBC, so what I was trying to do was write an ending that was so provocative that it would be impossible to cancel the show.”
For their part, “NBC was complicitous,” Caron said. “We don’t make the shows in secret. I said, this is what I’m going to do. She’s going to have a brain tumor. She’s going to go into a coma. And we’re going to put up a sign that says To Be Continued. And they said, great.”
Now that “Medium” has been safely picked up by CBS, where it will pair with “Ghost Whisperer” on Fridays, Caron feels the show is finally at home.
“The CBS conversation has actually been going on for about five years,” he said. “We (were) made by CBS, effectively, for NBC, in the same way that ‘House’ is made by NBC (studio) for Fox. So in truth, once ‘Medium’ was sort of realized, once there was a pilot, once everybody saw it, a number of people at CBS … said, gosh, that would be a great show for us.” When negotiations for renewal at NBC failed last spring, “CBS stepped into the breach. But it’s a possibility that’s always been out there.”
The NBC cancellation caught Arquette off guard, she said.
“I’d been told unofficially we were getting picked up,” she said. “I was about to buy a house. Then I got told we got dropped, I was unemployed. And then I got a job. It was like, you’re hired, you’re fired, you’re hired.”
The pairing with “Ghost Whisperer” is fine with Caron. “It’s clearly a show that people really like,” he said. “And frankly, given our history, it’s nice to follow a show that people really like. You know, the last time we came here, NBC made us walk.”

Gail Pennington is attending the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in Los Angeles.