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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Brandon Micheal Hall in God Friended Me, photo courtesy CBS

I had a chance to talk with God Friended Me star Brandon Micheal Hall as part of a recent roundtable discussion earlier this month. Hall, like Miles, was raised in a deeply Christian home. (His mother was a pastor.) Unlike Miles, Hall never walked away from faith, and he admits that taking on the role of an atheist was deeply challenging to him as an actor. (“I like taking on roles that are uncomfortable,” he adds.)

But for him, the idea of asking those tough questions is core to real faith. He says that sometimes people of all religious (or non-religious) stripes are scared of those questions. But we do a disservice to both God and ourselves when we shy away from them. And he believes people of faith have a lot they can learn from one another. Even the show itself, Hall suggests, is deepening his own understanding of faith.

“I don’t know everything,” he admits. “I don’t know everything about Christianity that I thought I did before I got this role.”

Hall says he wants “this show to make it as real as possible,” getting into the messy realities of what it means to walk by faith. But the show is meant to inspire, too. To offer, as he says, “elements of hope.”

The words hope and television don’t often go together. The best, most critically acclaimed shows tend to lean toward the bleak and tortured, and I understand why. It’s hard to inspire without coming across as a little treacly. It’s easier to make someone feel genuinely bad than genuinely good. Maybe that’s because we spend so much pretending to be good—we’re all doing just fine, thanks for asking—while keeping our pain hidden, just below the surface, that to tap that pain feels more honest somehow.

But I’m glad that, at least in the new television season’s early going, the small screen has carved out a little space for hope, and has given faith the floor. In some very pragmatic ways, it surprises me that we don’t see more shows like this. After all, even in our ever-more fragmented culture, millions of Americans find their ultimate hope in God and faith. And you know what? They watch television, too.

Who knows whether these or other spiritually-centric shows will draw people like Touched By an Angel or Seventh Heaven did back in the day. But I hope they do.

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