Barbara Walters ponders heaven

Assuming heaven exists, it might look awfully familiar to Barbara Walters -- a place where you wear many different designer clothes and you’re always backlit and no celebrity ever refuses an interview.

I counted 16 different outfits (not including the flashback interview with Elizabeth Taylor) for Walters in her ABC holiday special tonight, “Heaven: Where Is It? How Do We Get There?” These are big questions, big questions demanding answers. Answers from celebrities. Walters cobbles together Maria Shriver, Richard Gere and Mitch Albom -- a B-ish team, come to think of it, given that none of them is as big, quite, as Walters herself. There’s no Tom Cruise filling us in on Scientology and the afterlife, although Walters had Cruise as one of her “10 Most Fascinating People of 2005.”

Specials are what Walters does now, having left her role at “20/20” nearly two years ago. She positions the two-hour “Heaven” as a journey, an exploration -- into life as “an interlude between two great mysteries: Why we are here and where we are going?”

For the fairy godmother of the celebrity sit-down, the road leads to the Dalai Lama (“Are you a god?” she asks. “No,” he laughs.), to a failed suicide bomber (“Had you thought about maybe having a girlfriend, getting married, having children?”), to Shriver (“When you go to heaven, will you be meeting Uncle Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy?”).

There is a certain comfort one can still derive from a Walters special; her interviews bathe you in celebrity patronage and the coziness of the faux heart-to-heart (again, it could be the lighting). In “Heaven,” Walters comes onstage in this green brocade two-piece number, hands clasped primly before her; she’s apparently in a cathedral. The whole mood and lighting of the scene have the effect of making you feel as though perhaps you’re already in heaven, Walters narrating the brief “Welcome To” video, complete with gift shop hours.

Quickly we’re swept back in time -- to the Romans, to Mariah Carey’s song about heaven -- and soon it’s like Walters is shopping for the best package tour to that better place, querying religious Jews, Catholics, Muslims (peaceable and not), evangelical Christians, atheists.

“I must ask you a delicate question,” she says to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, D.C. “If when you go to heaven you are reunited with your loved one, let’s say with your wife or husband -- is there sex in heaven?”

Cardinal McCarrick indicates that what awaits the faithful is on another plane. But Feisal Abdul Rauf, Islamic scholar and imam of the Masjid Al-Farah mosque in New York, paints a fleshier picture of heaven, filled with “servants, lovely servants, young youths to regale you, Barbara, residing in gardens....”

Unsatisfied, or perhaps because she has the miles, Walters eventually travels to holy sites in Jerusalem; while in Israel she stops at a maximum security prison to mingle with members of the Palestinian militant group Hamas and sits down with the attempted suicide bomber. “Would you like me to go to hell?” she asks him. It’s out of my hands, but try giving yourself over to the Prophet Muhammad first, seems to be his answer.

Then she sends a postcard from the edge of the Himalayas in northern India, where we see Walters strolling mountainside backstreets with Tibetan monks before arriving to chat with the Dalai Lama (he has a very nice place, I don’t mind telling you).

They chat about the Buddhist concept of heaven as a weigh station for reincarnation, and Walters leaves understanding that if you do bad things on Earth, you could come back as a cow.

We get the Hollywood Buddhist version of things when she talks to Richard Gere.

Walters: “Do you come back as someone else or something else?”

Gere: “I’m someone else every breath. I really believe that.”

Walters: “Do you try to live your life in a particular way?”

Gere: “I’m here to serve. I’m here to serve.”

He’s a little abstract, in other words. Mitch Albom, author of “Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven” (coincidentally last year’s ABC holiday movie offering), puts it more plainly: “We’re all souls on this earth, and when we get to heaven what movie you were in or how much money you earned when you were here isn’t going to be the barometer as to whether or not you were a worthy soul.”

Can that be true, and if so, why did Albom put his name on the title of his own TV movie based on his own book? Here, Walters doesn’t probe. “Heaven” finds her in a familiar place -- perched on the love seat of inquisitiveness, staring meaningfully.

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‘Heaven -- Where Is It? How Do We Get There?’

Where: ABC

When: 9 to 11 tonight

Barbara Walters...Anchor

Executive producer David Sloan. Director George Paul.