OH, TV OF LITTLE FAITH
pray at least daily. And 77 percent say that religion is either very or somewhat important in their lives.
I don’t in any way expect or even want TV to be a strictly representative portrayal of society, but this strikes me as something it is particularly unlikely to depict. (“Last Chance U” is a documentary, so it plays by different rules than scripted programming.) Is it something you keep an eye out for?
Poniewozik: It’s interesting you bring up prayer, because that points up a basic question: What does it even mean to incorporate faith into a TV story?
I’m not sure it really counts as a treatment of faith simply to know that a character celebrates this holiday or that one. So prayer, at least, is one kind of external marker.
Why does this kind of representation matter? Because religious diversity is not getting any less important in public life. Because good stories are specific, and personal faith (or the conscious lack of it) is as specific as it gets. And because religion tries to answer some of the same questions that art does, about human frailties and emotion and dealing with the knowledge that you will die someday.
That can be a bummer! So TV networks have viewed it as a subject that gets you in trouble. You might get a sunshiny picture of it — the “7th Heaven” approach — or, occasionally, you got religion treated as an “issue,” in controversial, shortlived series like “Nothing Sacred.” Or it would be a device to signal that things had gotten real, as when President Bartlet tore into God on “The West Wing.”
All of which can be legitimate — some people do turn to a higher power only when things get rough. But there’s also religion as a routine, even dull part of daily life. “Friday Night Lights” did this well: Christianity (this was small-town Texas) was a steady part of life from Sunday church to Landry’s speed-metal garage band. But it was an exception.
I had my issues with “The Path,” Hulu’s drama about a we-swear-it’s-notScientology cult, but I was fascinated with how it explored the crunchy culture of Meyerism — delivering babies in birthing pools, the teenage son saying that his family listened only to ’60s and ’70s songs because “contemporary music brings darkness into the world.” And “Greenleaf” on OWN, a soapy-sincere melodrama set in a megachurch dynasty, has the kind of 3-D depiction of faith you can get only from a family whose life is religion.
Still, these are exceptions, whether because of nervousness or plain old secularist bias. Which areas of TV do you think are doing well by religion now? And do you find it sneaking in any places you wouldn’t have expected?
Lyons: TV is doing well by fringe or particularly extreme religious practice. Largely that’s because it’s just more interesting than common religious expression —“regular person conducts self in unsurprising ways” is not much of a story — but it’s also less likely to be criticized for its perceived inaccuracies. No one watches “The Leftovers” and blogs, “Hey, that’s not how my church asks for volunteers to stand in stockades on top of a taco truck and repent.”
Lots of shows that aren’t about religion still have That One Character Who’s Christian — think April Kepner, who initially avoided premarital sex and struggled to align her Christianity with her (now ex-) husband’s atheism on “Grey’s Anatomy,” or Grace, the teenage daughter on “The Good Wife.” Maybe this character is called upon to pray during particularly trying times, or to provide a morality lesson to other characters. This is maybe my least favorite deployment of TV God.
There are other ways shows approach having only one religious character. For example “The Americans,” where the teenage daughter Paige’s conversion winds up affecting the stability of her entire family. That’s partly because Paige revealed to Pastor Tim that her parents are spies, but the bigger conflict is that Paige and her parents now have conflicting models of purpose. Paige isn’t religious just because teenagers rebel against their parents; the character is religious because “The Americans” is a show about what constitutes truth and the vectors through which people build their identities. Sounds like religion!
There’s nothing wrong with stories in which religion or religiosity is a symbol. But most of us don’t experience our religious — or atheist, or agnostic or “spiritual” — identities as metaphor.
Poniewozik: I notice a pattern here: Most of the shows we’ve talked about are dramas, as were most of the series that came to mind preparing for this conversation. So naturally, I want to talk about sitcoms.
I can understand why TV writers don’t want to seem to be making fun of anyone’s god. To your point about fictional and fringe religions, NBC’s life-after-death comedy “The Good Place” is set in a bespoke, nondenominational afterlife whose details, we’re told, each major religion only guessed a small percentage of.
Yet good comedies should be among the best places to treat religion. It’s comedies, more than dramas, through which we get stories of workaday and family life outside heightened circumstances. Believers can be as funny as anyone — so can clergy members, even when they’re not walking into a bar in groups of three.
TV Land’s “The Jim Gaffigan Show” (which unfortunately recently ended its second and final season) is the rare comedy that works its characters’ religion in fully and with thoughtfulness — Jim’s priest, Father Nicholas (Tongayi Chirisa), is a regular character. There’s a funny and rich episode in which Jim is wrestling with his calling in life and is ashamed to learn that Father Nicholas was a soccer star and model yet gave it up for the priesthood. Maybe discovering a religious vocation isn’t laugh-riot material, but a fallible comedian wrestling with his value on Earth? That definitely is.
It’s no coincidence, probably, that faith pops up on comedies that are more daring and culturally specific to begin with, like “The Carmichael Show” or the “Blackish” episode where the Johnsons decide to attend their white neighbors’ church, and it ends up an incisive tour of how black and white Americans spend Sunday. Or the very Catholic “Jane the Virgin,” in which an image of the Virgin Mary might give a magic-realist speech at any minute. (Those three are network comedies, I’ll note — boutique pay-cable comedies often assume a more secular world, though I guess Gilfoyle being a Satanist on “Silicon Valley” counts for something.)
So far, so Christian. (I come from a mixed Christian-and-Jewish family; I went to Catholic church with my father as a kid; now my wife and kids and I are very secular Jews.) We’ve come a ways since the days “too Jewish” was a byword on TV, but it’s still a rarity to see a show like Amazon’s “Transparent,” which is so thoroughly Jewish that its second-season holiday episode took place on Yom Kippur — as befits a show where everyone has things to atone for.
Beyond that? It’s nice to see a Jewish-Hindu wedding on “New Girl.” But we’re still waiting for the much-theorized-about Muslim equivalent of “The Cosby Show” — the mainstream hit series that lets a wide audience embrace another culture on the deepest, most humane level of laughs.
Lyons: We are indeed still waiting for the mainstream Muslim show — though I’d love to shoutout the short-lived but charming 2007 CWseries “Aliens in America,” about a Muslim foreign exchange student. Canada also had “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” about a Saskatchewan mosque. It’s available on Hulu and might just be too Canadian for most American audiences.
In addition to the Jewish-Hindu “New Girl” wedding, this past season also brought us a Hindu Mundan ceremony on “The Mindy Project.” We also had the “hot mitzvah” on “Younger,” which struck me as an interesting example of how secular secular Judaism can be: A bat mitzvah-themed birthday party for a 25-yearold is both sacrilege and amazing, a rejection and a re-embrace of religious structure at once.
If we’re talking comedy, let’s shout-out the most churchgoing family on TV: the Simpsons. That show has found plenty of comic material in religion, including with God himself. “South Park” has, notoriously, not shied away from addressing religion, though it engages with the idea of religion from a strictly secular gaze.
Way, way on the other side of things is a drama conflicted about its ideas on non-Christian religion: “Game of Thrones.” The show uses religion both in metaphorical and literal ways: General structures of power, both religious and not, are corrupted and crumbling. But “magic,” broadly defined, also is re-entering everyday life. We’re meant to be skeptical of religion qua institution but open to the idea that its teachings are perhaps legitimate.
Poniewozik: “South Park” is a great example that a show doesn’t need to be devout to recognize religion’s power, or to engage with it meaningfully. It essentially began as blasphemy — it depicted a battle between Santa Claus and Jesus — and it has offended pretty much every major religion.
But one of its best episodes, about a young Mormon kid moving to town, is a kind of nonbeliever’s love letter to faith. It both ridicules the founding story of Joseph Smith and sincerely argues that the church is a net positive anyway.
This is maybe a good place to say a word for considered nonbelief, which is a kind of belief in itself. You mentioned Grace on “The Good Wife”; her embrace of God especially matters in contrast with the atheism of her mother, Alicia (a particular liability, the show made clear, for an aspiring politician). Neither is portrayed as right or wrong — the important thing, from the show’s perspective, is that they’re each asking moral questions, not how they come to the answers.
I’d also argue that “The Leftovers,” for all its attention to fictional cults, is about the importance of religion as we know it, and more specifically, what happens when faith is shaken. In its world, the underpinnings of every established religion are struck at once, after 2 percent of the Earth’s population vanishes, in a way that does not comport with any denomination’s teaching. Overtly, it asks what would happen if millions of people vanished. Implicitly, it asks what would happen if God did. (A question AMC’s “Preacher” also asked, with a lot more slapstick and gore and a lot less reflection.)
Lyons: Oh, interesting: I see “The Leftovers” in almost the opposite way, as in, “How could you be an atheist in a world where this happens?” Something so beyond the scope of human understanding or experience, without any kind of explanation — the largest, cruelest, most confounding and absolute miracle of all time.
Maybe none of the religious leaders on the show have things figured out. But I understand why so many of the characters think they do.
Poniewozik: In any case, you’re right that TV still often does better with fictional religions than actual ones. (“Leftovers,” “Game of Thrones” — even “Battlestar Galactica” was one very religious show.)
Which is one more reason I look forward this fall to the final season of “Rectify,” a beautiful little treasure on Sundance (that premieres Oct. 26). On the surface, it’s about a death-row inmate released after his murder-rape conviction is vacated. At heart, with characters of various degrees of faith, it’s about Christian ideals in living practice — redemption, forgiveness, grace. (Its creator, Ray McKinnon, played the idealistic, doomed preacher in HBO’s “Deadwood.”)
There are many reasons the series isn’t a big hit (slow pace, gloomy subject, art-house sensibility). But if anyone has ever wished for more and better series about religion, I beg them to catch up on it. TV as a medium has further to go, but for one more season, this small corner of the cable schedule remains, as the hashtag says, #blessed.