Shhh! Don't tell the others, but Medium's Joe Dubois is undoubtedly the most dutiful TV dad

Image: TV Guide

Being the only guy in a house with all women sounds like the set-up for a sitcom, but on Medium, Joe Dubois is separated from his wife and three daughters by much more than his gender. The women of the Dubois family all share their mother's psychic gifts. This means Joe isn't just dad to a medium's daughters, but father to three mediums whose growing pains are often agitated by the visions that haunt them in the supernatural series. It takes a supernatural dad to see to it that girls like that are raised right.

On Medium, beyond being a dad, Joe's a scientist, and episode after episode, it's his job to be the voice of reason, not just as the head of the house, but as a person whose mind is heavily steered by logic. This contradiction plays well in the husband-wife dynamic, where Joe can speak freely to his partner, but in raising his spiritually-connected daughters, he has to tread more lightly when it comes to answering their questions about what they are seeing and feeling, often in haunting dreams.

Throughout the series, Joe proves over and over again his patience as a dad who is frequently perplexed by his daughters in ways both common and not. When Ariel gets mixed in with a bad crowd in the third season, it's Joe who senses something is amiss with their daughter, and rather than push his daughter away with confrontations, the sensitive TV dad instead finds a way to steer his daughter down the right path without being overbearing. That's practically a miracle in itself, and Joe's the one in the family without powers!

Other times, Joe flies awake at night to calm his daughters Bridgette and Marie, just as often as he must with his wife – the man is operating on no sleep – and more than a few times we see Bridgette's doll end up in his arms, dutiful dad toting it along, recognizing its importance to his daughter as a tangible thing to hold in her increasingly weird world.

As his wife's biggest supporter and his daughters' consistent caretaker, Joe ends up becoming such a big part of the series' heart that by the end of Medium, the finale centers on that bond that cemented the family together, no matter how extreme things got, with a story that sends Joe to a place that most viewers never dreamed they'd see him reach.