TV Reviews : ‘Grace’ Combines Spirituality, Schmaltz

“Amazing Grace” is amazing goo.

On the one hand, this new NBC series’ positive depiction of religion--through Patty Duke’s newly ordained minister, Hannah Miller--is a healthy turnaround for a TV industry that gets spiritual for the most part only when praying for good ratings.

On the other hand, rarely has sentiment seen so much schmaltz.

Hannah is introduced tonight as a Rev. Fixit who wears her bleeding heart like a cross. Her shoulders sag with the problems of the world, problems she predictably resolves, via hugs and homilies, by the time the final credits roll.

A single parent, she relocates her young son (Justin Garms) and 16-year-old daughter (Marguerite Moreau) to a new home somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and starts new jobs as an interim church pastor and a hospital chaplain.

Meanwhile, she involves herself in a child custody dilemma that threatens to shatter the life of a friend. Obscured by her moralizing is that her own loose tongue--a seeming breach of ministerial ethics--has intensified the crisis.

Also prominent are Dan Lauria as a local attorney and Joe Spano as a lurking, inexplicably dour police detective. Both give a vague impression of having a history with Hannah, but this ambiguity is not cleared up. Nor is Hannah’s own history. We learn that she is a former nurse and addictive pill-popper, but don’t discover until next week’s episode that her religious epiphany apparently occurred during a near-death experience.

With Burt Reynolds playing a shady preacher whom Hannah stops from acquiring an elderly congregant’s life savings, the second episode at times projects a farcical “Picket Fences”-style ambience that elevates it above the premiere, but not dramatically so.

In fact, Duke’s glimmers of nuance and intelligence as Hannah clash with most everything else in this series, including tonight’s shamelessly pat and weepy ending, which argues persuasively for agnosticism.

* “Amazing Grace” premieres at 8 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).