Is there life after death? Um … Okay, next question. Are there any good new shows on television? Well, you might try “Afterlife,” which makes its premiere Thursday on BBC America and suggests that the answer to the opening question is yes, at least if you’re a middle-aged female psychic living in Bristol, England, who can talk to the dead and might once have been burned at the stake as a witch.

As to the second question, let’s just say the melancholy days between the last crumbs of Thanksgiving leftovers and the onslaught of constant Christmas cheer and a happy New Year are not the richest in the television calendar. When it comes to new shows, it’s virtually a near-death experience, which is probably why the BBC has chosen this moment to essay a tentative response to the tricky question of what exactly happens when you kick the bucket.

According to “Afterlife,” it’s a surprisingly busy period, in which the newly dead are likely to show up all over the place (supermarkets, theaters, apartments) seeking attention from the living and craving a little post-burial peace. Or so insists Alison Mundy (Lesley Sharp), a death-haunted psychic medium who lives alone in a house with garish wallpaper, a grimy bathtub, and the specters of murdered children materializing in the corner of the living room just when she’s trying to get the ironing done.

But then into her life walks Robert Bridge (Andrew Lincoln), a smooth young university lecturer in psychology with a bevy of pub-crawling, dope-smoking students who hang on his every word and, but for the strict policing of studentteacher relations, would surely do more than that. As a psychologist, Bridge’s specialty is the “phenomenon”of clairvoyance. Why he’s interested in it is never made clear. Perhaps it’s simply so he can look down his nose at it. Or could it be because his only son died three years earlier in a car crash? Does he subconsciously pine for Ouija boards and theremin-scored séances and communication with his own lost offspring?

One night Bridge takes his class to witness some clairvoyants at work at a local theater. The point is to demonstrate to his students that clairvoyance is a trick. The audience in the theater is small, as is the number of psychics on hand — two. The first is an obvious fake, an older man with a hackneyed stage patter out of an ancient Hitchcock film like “The Thirty-Nine Steps.” The second is Mundy, who walks onstage with the tentative air of someone who would prefer to be elsewhere. She explains that she has no control over her ability. Visions come unbidden and are not always welcome. Under the spotlight, she looks genuinely harrowed — tortured by a gift she does not want and cannot get rid of. But that, Bridge believes, is just part of an unusually convincing façade.

Soon Mundy spots a lavender-scented female ghost standing in front of an empty seat behind one of Bridge’s students. When, to Bridge’s fury, the student turns out to be more susceptible to Mundy’s visions than his own skepticism, we have a drama on our hands: The rationalist versus the seer; what, if anything, does each have to learn from the other? Evidently quite a bit, for despite his revulsion, Bridge is sufficiently intrigued by Mundy and decides to write a book about her.

“Afterlife” has more than its share of hokum, and some of its special effects are corny enough to make you suspect the spirit of Ed Wood may be hovering over the proceedings. But Ms. Sharp’s performance as a reluctant medium is riveting. With her aquiline nose and wide, fearful eyes, she holds the series together while she herself seems to fall apart. Even if you don’t believe in her visions, she makes you believe in her.

The six-episode series makes a telling contrast with NBC’s “Medium,” which recently began its third season on the back of strong ratings and the beauteous Patricia Arquette as the eponymous psychic. As per “Medium,” being a psychic — foreseeing murders, kidnappings, talking to the dead, etc. — can make for as cheerful a career as being a high-end interior decorator, even if one’s dream life tends toward the alarmingly vivid. Folks may think you’re loco, but you still get the aerospace-engineer husband, the house, the car, the kids, and the eternally spotless sunshine of Phoenix. To be a psychic is simply to take one’s just and honorable place in the vast panorama of the American dream.

Things are rather different among the gloomy row-houses of cloud-covered Bristol. Mundy may also refer to herself as a “medium,” but she’s perilously close to being an outcast, as if the days of witch-hunting weren’t so distant. No wonder bottles of red wine figure so prominently in her supermarket shopping cart.

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Next Monday, BBC America launches another new series, “The Eleventh Hour,” in which Patrick Stewart, the polished baldie of “Star Trek” and “XMen” fame (not to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company), plays a government scientist tracking down nasty stuff like cloned human fetuses and lethal viruses with the potential to go pandemic.

It sounds intriguing, but it’s amazing how utterly unexciting this series proves to be as it unfurls limply onscreen. One realizes that British directors have smaller budgets than their American counterparts, but do they have to make an aesthetic out of dreariness, as if gray skies were necessarily more “realistic” than sunny ones? Must every scene take place in the ugliest street in the neighborhood? It works when you have a compelling protagonist, as “Afterlife” does, but not without.

Amateurishly shot, drably scripted, and only passably acted, even by its star, “The Eleventh Hour” makes you appreciate the wealth and variety of visual eye-candy offered by even its most banal American counterparts. Perhaps it’s time for some gutsy yank to start a “CSI: Birmingham,” or something, and show ’em how it’s done. It would certainly make for an interesting experiment.

bbernhard@nysun.com