In Secular TV Land, Spirituality on Rise

Does television worship at the altar of the Almighty or what? Sure, insist many of its critics--the almighty Nielsens.

Yet . . .

Andy Sipowicz--the tormented, seething, hot-tempered, demon-ridden, woe-laden, utter-mess-of-a-cop in ABC’s “NYPD Blue”--ended this season a widower, on his knees praying.

In HBO’s dark prison series, “Oz,” the mother of a slain correctional officer met with the killer before his execution and, in a speech as intense as any on TV, told him, “You killed my son. You broke God’s law: ‘Love thy neighbor.’ You are my neighbor, and I love you. And I forgive you.”

And NBC’s “Law & Order” this season prosecuted a woman for killing a young girl during an exorcism that, as a former nun, the Catholic Church did not entitle her to perform. Like Joan of Arc, she claimed being commanded by a saint.

“She may hear God,” prosecutor Jack McCoy, a lapsed Catholic, sternly reminded the jury, “but she may not play God.”

What is going on here?

That’s what freelance TV reporter-producer Silvia Gambardella wondered. “I used to be a crime reporter, which is why I love these shows to begin with,” she explained this week. “With all the attacks they’ve been getting, I started to see other things in them, solely as a viewer, scenes about God and the Bible and spirituality and family values in shows where you wouldn’t expect it.” You would expect it in the WB’s familial “7th Heaven” and the huge CBS hit “Touched by an Angel,” which wears gentle piety like a cleric’s vestments.

“But not in ‘Law & Order’ and ‘NYPD Blue,’ ” Gambardella said. “I’m Catholic. So this piece kind of merged with my own spirituality.”

The “piece” is the one she pitched to Jacoba Atlas, supervising executive producer of “CNN NewsStand.” The result is “Prime Time Prophets,” Gambardella’s fresh view of TV spirituality appearing in the magazine program’s Thursday night “Entertainment Weekly” component. Robin Groth is the correspondent, but Gambardella wrote and produced this first-rate, 10-minute piece, and conducted all but one interview for it.

Gambardella approached “NewsStand” after a higher-profile TV magazine series she wouldn’t name had rejected her story idea, she said, because “it wasn’t celebrity-driven enough.” In contrast, God was a plenty big enough name for Atlas and “NewsStand,” whose reputation for edgy stories is on the rise.

There are no thumbs up or down in the segment, just an acknowledgment that godly themes are on the agenda of at least some producers and writers of secular prime-time series. Examples cited by “NewsStand” are a strong counterpoint to a blanket charge from Steve Allen in full-page ads purchased by the Parents Television Council that: “TV Is Leading Children Down a Moral Sewer.”

Holy hyperbole!

As Groth notes at the start of the “NewsStand” segment: “In the past, writers and producers felt religion was a mortal sin for prime time. Now it’s thought of not only as a divine act, but a ratings miracle.”

Well, not all writers and producers. Lasting barely a month in 1991 was Norman Lear’s CBS comedy “Sunday Dinner,” which featured a young wife who sorted out her emotions by speaking directly to a God she addressed as “Chief.” Lear takes the blame for its failure.

“I didn’t want to rush her spiritual nature,” he said not long ago. “I wanted the audience to love her first, thinking that was necessary before she could really hear God talk, before she could really express what was her need, her family’s need and the community’s need. I pandered to what I thought was the need for her to be so lovable she couldn’t succeed on her own convictions.”

With a new millennium approaching, why TV’s consecrated-come-latelys?

Although the blazing success of “Touched by an Angel” has taught the long-resistant TV industry there’s gold in God--beyond ritual nightly prayers for a 30-share in the Nielsens--something else appears to be influencing those running crime shows mentioned by “NewsStand.”

Tom Fontana, executive producer for both NBC’s now-canceled “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Oz,” tells “NewsStand,” for example, that Rita Moreno’s laudable character in the HBO series was inspired by his sister, a nun. Fontana was educated by Jesuits, who he says taught him to question. And he speaks here of a “constant battle with God to figure out what the point of the universe is and the battle within myself to either just accept God blindly or try to reason and make it all logical.”

Peering over Fontana’s shoulder as he works is a statue of St. Eligius, both the patron saint and name of the hospital in NBC’s “St. Elsewhere,” the 1980s series for which he wrote.

What struck Gambardella most, though, was the frequency of spiritual themes woven through “NYPD Blue,” a series much less famous for prayer than for deploying violence, sexual candor and street language on behalf of realism. Yet the godly metaphors flowed through last season’s episode that gave dying Bobby Simone his emotional liftoff.

And take Dennis Franz’s slab of a cop, the deeply flawed Sipowicz, who in an award-winning episode titled “Lost Israel” sought clues to a murder by reading passages in a Bible provided by a homeless man: “But I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart. . . .”

Said Gambardella: “What’s incredible is how much this man [Sipowicz] has traveled in his own spiritual journey. Nobody is like ‘Touched by an Angel,’ but we all can identify with some part of Sipowicz because he’s so human.”

Just as David Milch, co-executive producer of “NYPD Blue,” identifies with him at times. Like Sipowicz, Milch is a recovering addict with a spiritual side, one that he suspects was surfacing in his writing “before it was coming out of my mouth,” he tells “NewsStand” Thursday.

But some are asking more of TV than generic homages to spirituality. In Los Angeles, Gambardella spoke also with screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi, who six months ago formed Act One, a group of Christian writers devoted to teaching newcomers “to be more direct in portraying their Christian views on television.”

Isn’t that happening now? “We talk about that it’s OK to have God on television now,” she says Thursday, “but we haven’t gotten to the ‘J’ word, which is Jesus.”

Poor Sipowicz is probably prime time’s most tortured soul, and spiritual themes in cop shows usually arise from some kind of tumult or tragedy. Rare in TV, Nicolosi said earlier in a telephone interview, are joyous characters “for whom being a believer is a happy part of their life. I mean people who make reference to faith as a reason for the choices they make. And they’re happy about it. They’re balanced. They have meaning in their life. They’re not wacko fanatics who want to blow things up and attack you.”

A somewhat different view comes from Bill Cain, the Jesuit priest who created the controversial former ABC series “Nothing Sacred,” for which he wrote scripts about “reaching for the other person,” he tells “NewsStand.” If you do that and “write about truth,” he adds, “God will be in the writing, and you don’t have to apply God to the top of it.”

Where should God be applied in prime time, and how? What is going on here? The good news--given TV’s past sins of omission--is that the subject is even being debated.

* “NewsStand: Entertainment Weekly” can be seen Thursday at 10 p.m. on CNN.