Faith & doubt on the tube: 'Nothing Sacred.' (television program review)

In the premiere episode of ABC's "Nothing Sacred" (Thursdays at 8:00 P.M., Eastern), a younger priest and an older one are discussing the difficulties of living a life of faith. "My faith is simple," says the older one. "'When I see the world's glory/What can I say?/I do not think/I'll kill myself today.'" "Who's that, Chesterton?" asks the younger. "Lena Horne," replies the older, leaving the room.

Bingo.

The combination of wit, irony, and melancholy in that little bit of dialogue catches perfectly what's best, and to be warmly celebrated, about this rather fine new series. The writing is handsome and hip, the ensemble acting is right in the pocket, and mirabile dictu - it's a show about religious people that's actually about the religious - which, I'd say, is just the fully human - life.

It's also been attacked by the Catholic League as "morally offensive." Ghosts appear: of the fundamentalists who protested The Last Temptation of Christ (which was, if anything, too reverential) and "NYPD Blue" (which, in its first seasons anyhow, emerged as one of the most seriously and problematically moral things on the Tube). Condemning things before you've examined them is always a mug's game. Milton said so in the seventeenth century and so did Dr. Seuss in ours, in his great Green Eggs and Ham. You'd think folks would learn.

"Nothing Sacred" is set in an innercity parish in a generically indeterminate big city. The staff includes Father Leo (the older guy who digs Lena Home); Father Eric, newly ordained and longing for the certainties of monasticism rather than the velleities of the big city; Sister Maureen, devout and also insistent on calling God "Mother" as well as "Father"; Sidney, the accountant who is also an atheist ("I don't believe in God, but I like religion"); and, centrally, Father Ray, the pastor, thirtyish, committed to the priesthood and desperately, wryly unsure of the existence of God.

Okay, okay: that's pretty damn schematic. But this is tee-vee. And the opening episode is, well, a bit over the top, as are all opening episodes of series and most first paragraphs of novels. While fighting the city council to maintain his soup kitchen, Ray is also under criticism from his bishop because someone has been taping, and forwarding, his advice in the confessional to a young woman about abortion, and his advice is not exactly doctrinal. Plus - there's plus? Yep - it happens than a new kid in the parish school is the stepson of a former, preordination lover, now trapped in a loveless marriage. And Ray is getting back that old feeling, even going to meet the lady in a motel - where, natch, he bumps into some members of his flock.

Now that's a full plate for a fiftyminute pilot. But if you think melodrama is innately vulgar, then you oughtn't watch TV at all - or, for that matter, fool around with Anna Karenina. What makes the show work, and work it does, is that all its overheated and/or improbable subplots coalesce around a single, and quite serious, theme: Why do we try to live our lives to honor God when we're not really sure that He/She is even there?

One of my best friends in the world once told me that "anyone who thinks that religious life isn't melancholy doesn't know much about the religious life." What a smart thing to say, I thought. And then a few years later I read Karl Rahner's stunning definition, in The Practice of Faith, of what it is to be religious: it is "to believe that it is meaningful for a human being to speak into the endless desert of God's silence."

Okay, okay, again: it's a TV series, not a retreat, and it mainly wants you to buy the sponsor's product. But sometimes, even in the tawdry marketplace, you can do good things, even brilliant things (Shakespeare didn't write for fun, you know). The parish is Saint Thomas: Aquinas, I thought, when I got my preview tape, especially since the first episode is titled "Proofs for the Existence of God." And, in his sermon at the end, Father Ray even mentions Thomas Aquinas's famous five proofs. But I'm lucky to get to watch this stuff with my wife. "Saint Thomas!" she exclaimed as I reran the show for her. "Of course: the Doubter."

Hello. Series producers David Manson and Richard Kramer may or may not have intended the ambiguity - I think they did - but it's there anyway. The creative and exhausting tension between the two Thomases, between anxious skepticism and serene assurance, is right where we all live, unless we've fallen into that narcotic trance Graham Greene disdainfully called "the habit of piety."

Think again about the cast of characters. The older priest of simple faith; the young man with mystical yearnings; the benevolently practical and humanist nonbeliever; the passionately faithful, angry feminist; and the man stretched between belief and rejection. We're - and I don't just mean Catholics - we're each and all of these, depending upon the time of day and the mood. The population of the Saint Thomas parish house, in other words, is a psychic microcosm of the possibilities of belief. This could become a marvelous series, and a very grown-up one.

American TV and American movies have, by and large, done very poorly with religion. We may be, statistically, the most "religious" country in the Western world, but we're oddly more shy about talking about belief than we are talking about sex. We want our clerics to be cute: Bing Crosby crooning through Going My Way, or the grand Tom Bosley solving crimes in the silly "Father Dowling Mysteries," or the Episcopalian priest's family in Warner's schlockmeister "Seventh Heaven" - "The Brady Bunch Goes to Vespers." A rabbi? Forget it. And I think we are that way not out of stupidity, but out of an accurate sense that to examine, seriously, the nature of faith is to stare into an abyss that will, sooner or later, stare back into you. But then, on the other hand: of all the adjectives used to describe God, I don't think "nice" has ever appeared.

"Nothing Sacred" - great title, by the way - is not going to change our national diffidence about these things. Hell, it's smart enough, it may not even get renewed at midseason. But it's serious, and it's brave, and miles ahead of the crop of apocalyptic "Millennium" clones that currently infest the Tube. An hourlong dramatic series that actually makes some theological sense? Sink or swim, flush or busted, it's going to be worthwhile to follow the doings of Saint Thomas - the parish, the doubter, and the believer.