Ratings Show Firm Belief in ‘Angel’ : Television: Spiritual show defies conventional wisdom by beating the competition in prime time.

On TV, the unbelievable is routine. “The X-Files” regularly suggests that aliens from outer space are everywhere. “Lois & Clark” features a mild-mannered newspaper reporter donning tights and flying through the air faster than a speeding bullet. And “Picket Fences” has filmed an episode in which the Pope testifies in court as the only eyewitness to a murder in a small Wisconsin town.

But perhaps the most radical idea, at least by TV standards, comes from CBS’ “Touched by an Angel,” which boldly insists each Saturday night that God does indeed exist.

On television, believing in Superman or monsters from another planet is far more common than believing in the Almighty.

And, defying the industry’s conventional wisdom, viewers have responded. After a shaky first season in which it spent much of the time off the air, the series is regularly winning its time period on Saturdays at 9 p.m.

“Through thick and thin, preemptions, getting bounced from one time slot to another, even through the World Series, our viewers keep coming back,” marveled Martha Williamson, the executive producer of “Touched by an Angel.” The message to her is simple: “Whether the advertising community and self-described experts want to believe it, sex and soap are not the only thing that people want to see on television.”

“Touched by an Angel” is about two angels (played by Roma Downey and Della Reese) who interact with human beings in pain or at a crossroads to help them find the good in their suffering and assure them that God loves them no matter what.

“It’s brave of CBS to put this on, because even though I don’t think it’s a religious show, but a spiritual one, the minute you put a title on it, it puts a bad taste in people’s mouths,” said Downey, the angel-faced Irish actress best known for playing Jacqueline Kennedy in the TV miniseries “A Women Named Jackie.” “People will make judgments about it or dismiss it without even seeing it.”

CBS Entertainment President Leslie Moonves acknowledged that he and other network executives have been surprised at how well the show has done.

“Clearly this is a little bit of a signal that there is a lack of family programming on television today,” Moonves said. “This is a show that gives people hope, and there’s not a lot of that on the air anywhere.”

Television has always been “extremely sensitive in dealing with religious issues,” he said, for fear that some viewers might take offense and tune out. “But clearly,” he noted, “if handled properly, there is a real positive message to be gleaned from such material.”

The trick seems to be not to deal with any specific religion or theological dogma. While the two angels do exist on the show as messengers of God, their God is not specifically Christian, Jewish or Muslim. Christ is not mentioned, nor are issues of heaven and hell. God is simply some mysterious higher power who knows and understands far more than the humans or his angels could ever hope to know, yet gives all of them free will to choose right or wrong.

Williamson defines the show’s deity as simply “the God of love.”

“I don’t think there ever was any resistance to doing a spiritual show about faith, but there is always a concern about doing a religious show,” said Andy Hill, president of CBS Productions, which helps produce the show. “That’s the trap that a lot of these things fall into, because anything that is religious tends to start excluding people--and that’s the last thing any television show wants to do. Our goal has always been to make a show that a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew could all sit down and enjoy together.”

Christian groups, which generally bemoan either the lack of any religious content in prime-time shows or Hollywood’s often negative portrayal of the religious, have applauded the series.

L. Brent Bozell III, the publisher of an unabashedly conservative monthly newsletter that monitors television content and blasts what it claims is Hollywood’s liberal agenda, called “Touched by an Angel” “the most authentically religious prime-time series ever . . . a bold experiment that has worked. ‘Angel’ is remarkably, consistently, unambiguously in favor of faith; moreover, it has delivered the ratings to disprove claims that religion doesn’t work on prime time.”

Williamson said that religiously inclined viewers, especially Christians, which she herself is, will naturally be drawn to the show. But she added that the point is not to proselytize about Jesus or to promote one set of beliefs over any other--only to say that having faith is OK.

“If I was going to do a show about angels, then it had to accept the concept of a real God who loves us and who wants to be a part of our lives,” Williamson said. “And it had to have angels who love their job and respect their boss. It could not have fairy tale angels who fly around and twitch their nose and make things right. I wanted to rely more on the hard questions: If God is good, then why did this or that terrible thing happen? To meet head-on the fact that there are no easy answers and that faith is not a cop-out. Faith is not the opiate of the people who have no other choice, but faith is perhaps the most powerful weapon we have these days and is available to intelligent, logical-thinking people because God is intelligent and logical-thinking.”

Many of the show’s stories begin with inexplicable tragedy. With the help of the angels, who impersonate human beings much of the time, the bereaved and the sorrowful come to see that they can never know God’s rationale because they are merely human, but that God, no matter what, does indeed love them.

In one episode, for example, a surgeon was faced with transplanting a new heart into the man who ran over his five children while driving drunk years before--a man he’d vowed to kill. Ultimately, however, the surgery--a metaphor for forgiveness--released him from his grief and permitted him to love both himself and his wife for the first time since the accident.

In another, the devil appeared in the guise of a violent white supremacist, and the angels helped his followers see the light in rejecting him. The series has also dealt with suicide, adultery and homelessness.

“Many people in Hollywood are uncomfortable with this material,” Williamson said. “The business is run by educated, intelligent, sophisticated people who, chances are, went to college and were taught that religion is uncool and a cop-out. . . . But if you look at surveys, the vast majority of people in this country attend some kind of religious service or believe in some form of God. These are not fanatics. They’re just people for whom faith has a place in their lives and they would like to be depicted as normal, rational human beings.”

* “Touched by an Angel” airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).