Life Among The Dead -

In 2005, I came across a woman who would dramatically change my life. She’s a medium/clairvoyant by the name of Lisa Williams. I was looking for characters for potential reality shows. I stumbled across an un-aired pilot of a pseudo-talk show featuring “mystic” types. There was a numerologist (someone who correlates relationships between numbers and coinciding events); a psychic (someone who foretells the future); a tasseographer (someone who tells the future by interpreting patterns in tea leaves); an intuitive (someone who understands or knows something without any direct evidence); and Lisa, a medium (someone who talks to the dead) and clairvoyant (someone with the ability to gain information about an object, person, location or physical event through extrasensory perception). Yep, so Lisa talks to the dead!

As I watched the tape, I wasn’t impressed with the mystics on the panel. Most of them were using their abilities to predict the future. But fortunetelling doesn’t make for good TV because there’s no immediate payoff. The viewers don’t get to see if what the mystic predicted would ultimately happen. So, I was getting disappointed and about to press “eject.” Then Lisa hit the screen. She immediately took the show hostage. She stood up, insisting she was hearing from the spirit of an 18-year-old boy who died unexpectedly. She looked out into the audience.

“Does anyone recognize this boy?” she asked.

Several members of a family in the audience raised their hands saying that they could identify with the boy. Lisa went on to reveal that the boy had been shot. Family members confirmed that yes, he had been shot. Lisa said it appears it was a suicide. Again, the family agreed. But then Lisa said something no one expected.

“He’s telling me he was murdered. It wasn’t a suicide”, Lisa announced.

The family members burst into tears.

“Everyone thinks I killed myself. But I didn’t. Can you understand that?” Lisa asked the family.

The boy’s mother said yes through her tears. They had always suspected that her son was murdered but there was no evidence and no way to prove it.

Lisa walked down from the stage and into the audience where the boy’s mother was standing. She put her arms around the woman.

“Do you know who Tom is?” Lisa asked.

The woman immediately began sobbing again. “Yes. That’s who we believe killed him.”

“Tom is the one who killed him. He keeps saying Tom; it was Tom,” Lisa said.

The scene was heartbreaking. Everyone in the audience was crying as Lisa hugged the boys’ mother in a hopeless display of naked grief. Heartbreaking, yes, but as a TV producer, I knew it also to be breathtaking. This was incredible television. Watching Lisa, I knew I could sell a TV show around her! I was stoked.

Let me explain something to you… Reality shows are all about “characters”. Whether it’s Kim Kardashian or Honey Boo Boo, these programs live or die on the personalities whose shoulders carry the show. And when it comes to TV characters, Lisa is the total package. She’s a Brit with spiky, multi-colored hair, she has a sexy Julie Andrews accent, she’s both classy and a bit brassy, her personality is bubbly and bright, and best of all for me, she jumps off the TV screen. She instinctively knows how to play to the cameras – and that’s something that is tough to teach.

I did a Google search for Lisa, found her number and rang her up the very next day at her home in Birmingham, England. When she answered the phone, the first thing she said to me was that she was expecting my call. I laughed… but was immediately struck by the feeling that she was completely serious. My only encounter with a medium/clairvoyant, or for that matter, any type of psychic, was meeting John Edward in the makeup room when I ran E! News. He was the host of a Sci-Fi network show Crossing Over with John Edward. He was booked as an in-studio guest on E! News Live. He came across to me as a genuinely nice guy. The format of his show consisted of him in an auditorium with a crowd of people. Spirits would talk to him – these spirits being dead friends or relatives of audience members in the room – and John would pass along their messages. This format was very similar to what Lisa had done in the “mystic” pilot I had watched, but John was the first to do it on the air. And because he was first, he had a lot of critics attacking what he did. There were allegations that he had prior knowledge of the people he was reading and was accused of using an array of quick and sometimes general guesses to create the impression of psychic ability. The claims were baseless… but there are always people waiting in the wings to tear other people down. At that time, the controversy didn’t affect me one way or the other since I wasn’t doing any shows in the “psychic” space.

Now that I found Lisa, though, I knew I had to come up with a fresh format that wasn’t just a copy of what John does, sitting in an auditorium doing readings. I also wanted to make the format “critic-proof” so that no one could accuse Lisa of perpetrating a fraud. So, my idea was to take the show to the street. My producing partner, Andrew, and I got $60k together and decided to shoot a full-blown pilot on the streets of Manhattan.

The 2005 Unaired Pilot