Network TV Is Embracing Something New This Fall: Faith

Last updated on: September 28, 2018 at 10:33 am by Paul Asay

Network TV Is Embracing Something New This Fall: Faith 2018-09-28T10:33:48-06:00 Paul Asay

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Melissa Roxburgh in Manifest, photo courtesy NBC

NBC’s Manifest premiered Sept. 24 and grabbed some pretty healthy ratings. When I flipped it on to review it, I was expecting to see a mashup of Lost and This is Us. And sure enough, it was.

But I wasn’t expecting that the first episode to be predicated on a Bible verse—a passage that feels like it might inform the entire show.

“You know my favorite verse,” a woman tells her grown daughter as they wait to board their flight back in 2013. “’All things work together for good!’”

“I don’t believe that anymore,” the daughter, Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh), says.

Moments later, Michaela (along with her brother, Ben, and Ben’s son Cal) accept $400 vouchers in return for catching the next flight out. That flight winds up arriving late: Five-and-a-half years late. By the time Michaela touches American soil again, her mother’s been dead for years.

But in the episode’s narrative waters, that verse (a portion of Romans 8:28) lands like a rock, sending ripples throughout the entire show. Michaela sees the verse embroidered on a throw pillow. The verse number itself is echoed on a mysterious storage crate and on the ill-fated flight itself: flight MA-828. It’s all too suggestive of a higher power at work, and ey episode end, Michaela’s in church, holding a Bible, wondering about the significance of it all. And when she asks a friendly priest if she can take it, the priest says yes—“as long as you put it to good use.”

Taking a cue from the late, great Lost, showrunner Jeff Rake told The Hollywood Reporter that the tension between faith and science is a “huge thrust of the show. Ben [played by Josh Dallas] is inspired by Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters [of the Third Kind]. Michaela is a lapsed person of faith. She believes all of this might connect to a higher calling. It’ll be one of our series mythology questions.”

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