CBS Entertainment Chief: She Could've Danced All Night

"Is the pope attacked by locusts?" snapped one critic.

"No -- vampire bats," she responded.

Brava!

Jennifer Love Hewitt, making her second appearance at Summer TV Press Tour 2005, says that since starring in CBS's new one-hour series "Ghost Whisperer" as a woman who talks to dead people, she's no longer afraid every two seconds that she's going to be run over by a bus.

"I was terrified of death -- I'm not now," she said, batting her false eyelashes and flicking her tumbling auburn tresses at the throng of smitten Reporters Who Cover Television, who had packed themselves around closely to ask more questions after her show's Q&A session.

"I live every day for the moment -- I don't want unfinished business" when she dies, she explained perkily, while the little diamond cross and two diamond hearts sparkled on the delicate chains around her neck.

In her new series, Hewitt's character helps dead people to resolve their "unfinished business" so they can "cross over." Not coincidentally, professional dead-person talker-to James Van Praagh, who worked on two highly rated talking-to-dead-people flicks for CBS, is a co-executive producer on "Ghost Whisperer."

Shows about dead people are hot because "people want to know what death is" and "not everybody is comfortable going to a therapist," but they are comfortable watching TV, Hewitt explained, her chest heaving softly in her ivory lace bustier. Since Sept. 11, 2001, she said, people have been concerned about the topic because we continue to "lose all these extraordinary" people who are fighting "to take care of our country and our better lifestyle."

"When we lose a person, we lose one of our kind," she explained.

Patricia Arquette's role as a woman who talks to dead people, on NBC's "Medium," is very different from Hewitt's role as a woman who talks to dead people, she told the adoring crowd of Reporters Who Cover Television, because Arquette's character has been married a long time, while Hewitt plays a newlywed. And Arquette's character solves crimes, while her character does not.

"You know what?" she asked rhetorically during the Q&A session. "My character is absolutely one of my favorite people I've been introduced to."

And, better yet, this was "the easiest job in the world" because, Hewitt said -- while noting "I really shouldn't say this" -- no acting was required.

"The hardest thing for me to do was not to cry in every scene."