Pick of the week
Post-Gazette TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week
TUESDAY
“Miracle Workers,” 10:30 p.m., TBS.
Heaven sure has become a popular place for setting comedies. “Miracle Workers” joins NBC’s “The Good Place” as another comedy set in the celestial realm, but “Miracle Workers” is less concerned with moral philosophy than it is heaven as a cube farm run by an uninterested CEO, God (Steve Buscemi).
Watching reports on climate change, God is pretty bummed about his creation to the point he’s ready to destroy Earth and move on to a new project.
Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry Potter”) plays a low-level angel in charge of answering prayers — he prefers finding lost gloves to saving lives — whose workaday routine is upended by eager beaver cog-in-the-heavenmachine worker Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan) after she makes a bet with God she can answer the prayers of a couple who want to fall in love. If she can, God will spare humanity. If not, Earth gets destroyed.
Based on the book “What in God’s Name” by Simon Rich (FX’s “Man Seeking Woman”), this seven-episode limited series is both cynical (about God as CEO) and full of hope (about the potential for humanity). It’s also consistently clever and funny.
Early jokes stem from Eliza’s misunderstanding of the consequences of her actions — answering a prayer to bring rain to crops inadvertently also leads to a typhoon and a huge loss of human life — but it will be interesting to see how the show moves forward as it explores the human couple Eliza attempts to play cupid for.