TV Reviews : ‘Angels’: Someone to Watch Over Us

Having seriously bummed out the TV-watching world earlier this year with the highly rated “Ancient Prophecies,” the producers of that frightfully apocalyptic special now compensatingly coo in our collective ears with “Angels: The Mysterious Messengers,” offering the promise that benevolent guardian spirits are watching over us. (Yeah, tell it to Nostradamus.)

This two-hour special is about 5% serious theology, 5% secular skepticism and 90% credulous pop spiritualism. Patty Duke narrates long and involved stories about common folk having real-life encounters with heavenly beings, sometimes as part of near-death experiences, sometimes in conscious broad daylight.

A young woman about to return to her apartment gets pulled back repeatedly by a hand on her shoulder, finding out hours later a neighbor was murdered in the elevator. A singer about to be involved in a car accident keeps hearing a voice that warns, “Be careful--this next birthday could be your last,” and shouts out a life-saving warning. And vaguely so on and intriguingly so forth.

There’s not much here to convince true nonbelievers; Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of the uncomforting “How We Die,” steps in with some token naysaying about how endorphins can produce heavenly hallucinations. On the other hand, there is plenty of anecdotal affirmation to supply the millions who’ve already snatched up recent bestsellers such as Sophie Burnham’s “The Book of Angels” and Eileen Freeman’s “Touched by Angels,” with both those authors interviewed as well.

And in the middle, probably, will be mainline religious sorts who believe in angels and yet may find the current phenomenon of venerating them misguided. Biblically, angels tended to admonish and exhort as often as they comforted, but in the contemporary mind set, they seem to exist more to provide spine-tingling Time-Life tidbits than to provoke widespread spiritual revival.

* “Angels: The Mysterious Messengers” airs at 8 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).