With their quaint interest in the truth, TV's crusading psychics offer a new kind of escapism in the duplicitous Bush era

I have a confession: I'm compulsively drawn to TV's psychics and their criminal-nabbing, family-reuniting powers. Please don't tell my bosses at Radar. They demand icy skepticism at all times and once sprayed me with mace just for saying I liked Jesus. And, really, all I meant was that I liked Jesus's look: the tidy beard, the mysteriously Caucasian skin, the skillful exploitation of lambs as accessories.

Despite the risks of being discovered and maimed, I can't help myself. I love the spooky showboating sleuths who populate two hit Court TV shows, Psychic Detectives and Haunting Evidence, and can't get enough of Jennifer Love Hewitt as the supernaturally perky Ghost Whisperer in CBS's "based-on-reality" series. I haven't yet fully succumbed to Medium (too dreary), Psyche (too third-eye-in-cheek), or the newest wannabe, Heroes, but the latter is scattered with clairvoyants and telepaths and conspiracies, so I'll probably keep tuning in ... discreetly.

I'm told my top-secret perversion is also popular in England (home of hits like Most Haunted and the supposedly awesome Afterlife), Australia (Sensing Murder), and Japan, where 17 million weekly viewers watch a reality show called Chounouryoku Sousakan which translates as "FBI: Psychic Detectives" or possibly "Deviant Behavior Set to John Philip Sousa Marches." And then there are the Scandinavians, reportedly as nuts for televised psychics as they are for alcoholism and despair.

But hold on. I'm not a disconsolate drunk like the Swedes, or short, like the Japanese. I'm not gullible white trash. (My family preferred the term "pallid debris.") No stranger to skepticism, I graduated from a reputable university where my ruthless demystification of the Pippi Longstocking trilogy was widely praised.

So why am I suddenly so susceptible to psychic sleuths?

Perhaps it has something to do with this shady point in America's history, when public figures from "novelists" to priests to pedophiliac Republican congressmen just routinely lie. When it comes to trotting out my skepticism, my exhaustion makes poor Lindsay Lohan's seem mild. Frankly, I'm desperate to believe in something, and TV's truth-chasing psychics offer a nice antidote to institutionalized deceit. I admire their determination to expose criminals who have, so far, "got away with it." I love the seductive notion that no lie can escape their apparent All-Knowingness. Even if they're lying, too—and, yes, I'm versed in the tricks of cold reading, and realize that clever editing can simulate psychic awareness—well, I don't care.

In her second season as the Ghost Whisperer, Hewitt is growing increasingly skilled at scripted omniscience. Her daffy, humble character, Melinda Gordon, sells antiques at the senselessly named store Same As It Never Was in a town that's hermetically sweet in that pre-terrorism, 1950s way (no surprise: the show is filmed on the old Back to the Future set). Nevertheless, this town is crawling with dead people. Ghosts who need to be heard. They either didn't commit some crime, or don't actually hate their mothers. And since Melinda alone can hear their whispers, they randomly assault her as she's buying lattes or coordinating another ill-conceived "vintage" outfit in which to show off her intuitive cleavage. You'd think she might find this unnerving, but Melinda is both patient and never more than fleetingly troubled.

At the end of each episode, after laboriously repeating the ghost's message word-for-word to the being's once-disbelieving but now incredibly touched relatives, she sends the ghoul safely into the Light. That's when my boyfriend usually starts crying. And I'll admit it: sometimes, me, too.

Characteristic of psychic shows, the plot always hinges on a need for closure. As in: "Did Grandma really commit suicide?" Or: "But what about those hanging chads?" Or: "Did Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert know about Mark Foley's IMs or not?"

While Hewitt's character achieves closure of a gentle, loving, poorly acted sort, the real-life mystics of Court TV's Psychic Detectives and Haunting Evidence pull no punches. The former reenacts investigations that psychics have allegedly solved; the latter showcases paranormal sleuthing in real-time, as a trio of spiritualists try to kick-start cold cases in the tradition of America's Most Wanted.

As the Haunted Evidence crew visits mundane towns quintessentially "torn apart" by the slaughter of someone's child, wife, or girlfriend, their SUV creeps down lonely streets until one of them yells "Stop!"—correctly identifying the murder scene, as the voice-over points out. Then the real work begins.

Globally "sought-after medium" John Oliver, rarely seen without his $260 Gucci sunglasses (perhaps because his eyes tend to roll back in his head), spends a lot of time aggressively sniffing the air before delivering his insights in the authoritative, slightly prissy manner of a wedding planner. "Renowned psychic profiler" Carla Baron—a fierce, Holly Hunterish woman—tends to get pissed as her sense of the murder crystallizes. In the case of a girl who was fatally raped while drunk, Baron suddenly bristles: "She told [the attacker], 'I don't even feel it. Do what you want.' And that infuriates him."

It's gaudy television, full of bluish lighting and gratuitous f/x, but, for anyone who needs a break from the 24/7 cynicism the Bush years require, it's also soothing television. After suspending doubt for an hour, watching as Oliver and Baron cluck and fume their way closer to the killer's identity, or a child-molester gets cornered by the Psychic Detectives, I'm ready to return—refreshed and renewed—to the business of doubting absolutely everything.

At least until it's my time to be prodded into the Light by Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts.