Karen Hall, who as a professional writer and producer of TV shows should know, offers her take on the controversial “Book of Daniel” show.
The problem is that there is no typical Christian family on network television, therefore, there is no context and “The Book of Daniel” can only be seen as Hollywood’s idea of Christianity.
If every African American character on television was a drug dealer, or if every Muslim character on television was a suicide bomber, imagine the public outcry. And it would be an appropriate outcry. Yet there is never a depiction of a Christian on television unless he or she is a serial killer, an adulterer, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a child molester—or, at best, just a garden variety hypocrite.
... I would argue that the last election was the mother of all focus groups. The box office for “The Passion” was a pretty good indicator of what the audience wants to see, too. How on earth do people who supposedly want to have a big hit show look at those two things and say, “I know! Let’s make a show about a pill-popping Christian minister with a gay son, an alcoholic wife and a promiscuous daughter!”
I still stand by my prediction that the show will not last to the end of the season and will be canceled due to low ratings.
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Do you remember Nothing Sacred? It tanked in the ratings but lasted much longer than shows with relatively higher ratings.
Though this time there is much more pressure and advertisers are dropping like flies.
What about Ned Flanders?
Seventh Heaven is going on its tenth(?) season. The father of the large family is a minister.
Folks: Watch LOST. Check out Amy’s site for a great conversation on all the Catholic themes that happened, esp this past Wednesday!
http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2006/01/the_book_of_los.html#comments
The target audience might not be Christians or even Catholics. There are a huge number of self-identified ex-Catholics out there and many very lukewarm ex-Christians. They are the target audience.
They love to see the failings of Christians, including Catholics, piloried. It amuses them and makes them feel better about their screw-ups, admitted and not.
Some of this is inevitable, it appears to me, but some of it has been caused by the very poor examples many Christians, including Catholics, have given of teaching the genuine faith and living it on a day-to-day basis.
Principally, the problem is that the conversation culturally has turned the philosophical foundations of discourse around so that any sound exposition of right and wrong falls into a paradigm that can only be characterized as a “morality play,” with the script already written.
Somehow, to supercede this, the script has got to be broken WITHOUT denying the Church’s teachings.
[because to deny church teaching is to flush the baby with the bathwater—it goes nowhere. If you don’t believe this, you’ve bought the script.]
NOTE: some attempt to move this sideways by “dialogue,” but in the process, always imply that the church teaching is defective—part of the script. This is what is wrong with current attempts—a very very serious fault and an automatically losing strategy.