Up until now, the year’s big cable-ratings story has been the ever-growing success of zombie drama The Walking Dead on AMC. Sunday night, though, History channel had the highest-rated scripted drama on cable for the year.
The first two hours of History’s Mark Burnett miniseries adaptation of The Bible scored 13.1 million viewers, more than any fiction cable show of the year–and, as the New York Times notes, dwarfing anything on NBC for the past month. (The biblical epic numbers did not quite match The Walking Dead in viewers aged 18 to 49, the demographic that determines advertising rates, but it did get a healthy 5.6 million.)
Those are the kinds of numbers that get TV executives’ attention, and “attention” in the TV business means copying. Last year, History pulled meganumbers with Hatfields and McCoys; now NBC is developing a Hatfields and McCoys series. Does this mean we'll see more religious epics coming to TV? Stories aimed, like The Bible miniseries, at believers?
One of the best recent examples was Friday Night Lights. Faith mattered to people in Dillon, Texas: they went to church, prayed on problems, played Christian rock in their garages. It didn’t magically fix anything, nor did it make the people of Dillon better or worse than people anywhere else, but the show took it seriously, and matter-of-factly, as a major part of its characters’ worldviews.
On network TV, some of the more interesting recent storylines about faith have been happening at the margins of The Good Wife–one of the more “cable-like” broadcast shows to begin with. The protagonist, Alicia Florrick, is an open atheist–even more of a rarity than an avowed believer on TV–and this became an issue recently when she refused to hide her disbelief to help Peter’s gubernatorial campaign. At the same time, her teenage daughter has been drawn to Christianity, and the way the show has handled Alicia’s reaction–not preachily, but as a story about a parent working to accept her daughter’s separate identity–has been exemplary without being showy.
These are still exceptions, though. (There are a few more depictions of the faithful in reality TV, especially on cable–Sister Wives, the Duggars.) The reason TV series should have religious characters and take them seriously is because it makes for better stories. People who believe things are interesting. People wrestling with the big questions are interesting. And TV shows that depict actual lived life–with characters who are specific rather than generic–are interesting.
Of course, programmers often read “interesting” as “dangerous,” especially when it comes to religion.
