As I was reading the Post this morning, I came upon a review of Revelations, which is premiering tonight. It was written my TV critic Tom Shales in his snarky progressive mode so I went off to see what else was being said. Quite a range of commentary from ridicule to embrace. I found in this piece an interesting overview.
TV gets religion
A surge in Christian-themed programming could be one more sign of the conservative times. Or perhaps it's the almighty dollar.
By David Zurawik
Sun Television Critic
Originally published April 13, 2005
In the beginning was the Left Behind, The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ. Then came the re-election of the Bush and all the talk about "faith and values" by prophets of the exit-poll data. Now comes network television trying to capitalize on religion.
That's the gospel behind a slew of new programs, including NBC's Revelations, infused with religious themes, plots or characters. The highly publicized, six-hour miniseries, which debuts tonight, stars Bill Pullman and Natascha McElhone as a skeptical Harvard scientist and an outlaw Roman Catholic nun investigating what appear to be signs of the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelations. Ratings permitting, the producers are poised to make Revelations a weekly series starting in the fall.
Also in production for a possible fall debut as a weekly series is NBC's The Book of Daniel, starring Aidan Quinn as a drug-addicted Episcopal priest who has conversations with what NBC publicity materials describe as a "contemporary cool" Jesus. As if that weren't enough to make the bishop's head spin, Quinn's character also has a daughter who is arrested for dealing drugs, a gay son and a brother-in-law who steals money from the church and is found murdered. Think Robbie Coltrane's Cracker with a clerical collar.
Fox, meanwhile, has a series in the works about an excommunicated priest with a drinking problem who uses a gun in his self-ordained "battle against evil." Titled Briar & Graves, the series is characterized by the network as "The X-Files goes to church." At CBS, there's an untitled series in development about a world-class physicist "with strong religious beliefs."
"The answer in Hollywood is always follow the money," said the Rev. Frank Desiderio, president of Paulist Productions, a Hollywood production company owned by the Catholic order of priests. "Start with the Left Behind books and their $650 million in sales. Then, there's The Da Vinci Code with 25 million books sold, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, with a $1 billion box office. That's where this current wave of religious programming began."
The Left Behind series, written in 1996 by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim F. LaHaye, is a fictional account of the Rapture of the Saints, a biblical story about believers being swept into heaven while nonbelievers are left on Earth. The Da Vinci Code, a 2003 thriller by Dan Brown, involves a secret society dating to the death of Christ. The Passion of the Christ, a graphic crucifixion film, is now the seventh all-time box-office earner in film history.
"You have those three phenomena, and then you have Bush's re-election, which put religion on the cultural center stage - and that's why the networks are now making shows like Revelations," said Desiderio, who co-produced the 2002 ABC made-for-TV movie Judas.
NBC bought Revelations long before The Passion premiered, points out Gavin Palone, executive producer of the miniseries. But he doesn't doubt that Gibson's film catalyzed the current run on religiously themed series.
"I made a pitch to the networks based on certain cultural trends that I saw, " Palone said. "I talked about such things as The Da Vinci Code. But I also gave statistics on the number of people who were Christians who believe that the events as foretold in the Book of Revelations would come to pass [59 percent, according to a 2002 CNN/Time Magazine poll]."
Nonetheless, when he initially made his pitch, neither CBS nor Fox would listen. "If you look at what we've seen on television for the past 40 or 50 years, any time that you have some kind of spirituality scene on camera it's more of the Highway-to-Heaven, Touched-by-an-Angel, Joan-of-Arcadia variety where there is no specificity to it and where nobody is really a Christian," he said.
"Nobody says, 'I believe in Jesus Christ.' Nobody ever says, 'I believe there will be an end of days coming as foretold in the New Testament.' Nobody even references the New Testament. And that's really surprising since so much of America does think in those terms."
Primetime network television's approach to religion generally has been narrow, peculiar and dominated by superficiality. The first series to feature a religious character - and to become a ratings success - was ABC's The Flying Nun, which went on the air in 1967. It portrayed a flying nun played by Sally Field.
NBC's Highway to Heaven, starring Michael Landon as an angel sent to Earth to spread love while earning his wings, debuted in 1984 and left the air in 1989. It was followed in 1994 by Touched by an Angel, which featured Roma Downey as an apprentice angel sent to Earth to help mortals while earning her wings. Only the gender changed.
The most serious attempt at religious drama in the 1990s was ABC's Nothing Sacred, co-written by a Jesuit priest, Bill Cain, and starring Kevin Anderson as a blues-loving, doubt-ridden, inner-city priest earnestly seeking social justice for his parishioners. It lasted less than a full season in 1997-1998 before being canceled for poor ratings.
The longest-running religious drama in TV history is 7th Heaven, the WB series about a minister's family created by Aaron Spelling, king of the primetime soap opera. It debuted in 1996 and is still one of the most successful series on WB (though WB and UPN generally have much smaller audience standards for measuring success than ABC, NBC or CBS).
A wave of darker dramas arrived after 9/11, such as Carnivale (HBO), Joan of Arcadia (CBS), Dead Like Me (Showtime), Wonderfalls (Fox) and Point Pleasant (Fox). Of the five, only Carnivale and Joan are still on air; both face cancellation in the coming weeks.
Joan and Carnivale generally are seen as authentic - if commercially failed - attempts by Hollywood to respond to the uncertainty felt by many Americans after the trauma of 9/11. But with series like Revelations, Hollywood may be using religion for its own ends.
"The mistake the TV executives seem to be making with these new series is that even though they see that religion sells in something like The Passion, they don't really seem to trust it, and so they try to jazz it up," said Diane Winston, Knight chair of religion and media at the University of Southern California. "Instead of a story that might feel authentic to many Christians the way The Passion does, now you have a scientist, a nun and the Book of Revelations all mixed up with The X-Files."
Indeed, the first hour of Revelations (the only hour made available to critics) resembles a watered-down version of the late, great Fox drama, which aired from 1993 to 2002. X-Files, which attained cult status, depicted FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they traveled the globe hunting extra-terrestrials. Their motto was "trust no one."
Throw in a little of the apocalyptic tenor of The Omen - also written by Revelations creator David Seltzer - and you've got a six-part series that serves neither Scripture nor drama.
In recent weeks, Jenkins and LaHaye, of the Left Behind series, have vociferously criticized Revelations. The series is "a mishmash of myth, silliness, and misrepresentations of Scripture," says Jenkins in an e-mailed statement. In a response to Seltzer's saying that he hopes Revelations will tap the same audiences as those of Left Behind and The Passion, LaHaye said, "This is a good example of someone who doesn't know the message - and doesn't know that he doesn't know."
"Most executives are risk-adverse and just want to repeat what worked before," said Desiderio. "That's why everything kind of looks like The X-Files. I mean, the producers themselves described Briar & Graves, the Fox pilot, as 'X-Files goes to church.' I can just see the pitch meeting now: 'We've got the next X-Files, but it's in a church.'"
Desiderio thinks the rise of primetime religion could be a good thing: "I'm happy with any television program that takes God seriously." But little about the new crop of shows has inspired his optimism.
"The trouble is that most TV is not sophisticated enough to represent theological ideas beyond the war of good and evil," he said. "Things tend to get reduced to the devil and God, and they're both off-stage - and usually the devil is a much more interesting character."
Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun |
