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Averroës Nix

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« on: January 01, 2022, 07:41:36 PM »
« edited: June 14, 2022, 05:28:07 AM by Averroës Nix »

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LabourJersey
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« Reply #1 on: January 01, 2022, 09:17:06 PM »

A major factor in that is how TV writers are an overwhelming secular group of people. Another factor is that even the writers and showrunners who are religious feel uncomfortable with presenting religion on the screen. Another factor is the unfortunate fact that many Americans view Christianity as having just 2 flavors: old-school Catholicism and bible-thumping evangelicalism.

I have noticed this before, since even TV shows that are explicitly about having faith and belief ignore organized religion in a very strange way. Ted Lasso is a good example--the tagline of the show is literally "Believe" but the topic of religious belief or anything related to it doesn't come up.

But some shows definitely focus on religion and spirituality and focus on it well. The 2nd season of Fleabag is a perfect example, and one of my favorite shows in the last few years.
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« Reply #2 on: January 01, 2022, 09:30:31 PM »

Honestly, it likely comes down to it being more difficult for an irreligious person to relate or understand a character that's going through complicated religious struggles, but everyone can more or less follow when shows grapple with more universal or secular morality conflicts.
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Nathan
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« Reply #3 on: January 01, 2022, 09:38:37 PM »

Honestly, it likely comes down to it being more difficult for an irreligious person to relate or understand a character that's going through complicated religious struggles, but everyone can more or less follow when shows grapple with more universal or secular morality conflicts.

Sure, but the "universality" point can be made (with varying degrees of convincingness) about any writing focusing on anyone who isn't a heterosexual, able-bodied, agnostic or very vaguely Christian white man, and I think what Averroes is asking is why there's a push to allow more "specificity" in storytelling along all of those axes but one.
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Del Tachi
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« Reply #4 on: January 02, 2022, 02:12:56 AM »

A major factor in that is how TV writers are an overwhelming secular group of people.
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afleitch
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« Reply #5 on: January 02, 2022, 05:06:54 AM »
« Edited: January 02, 2022, 05:23:42 AM by afleitch »

The US is the world leader and pioneer in specifically religious broadcasting; an entire alternate media alongside 'secular' media. Anyone who directly wants that sort of religious ethical apologism in media has it. And 'secular' media is aware of it. That probably impacts perception of both 'how to write' and 'who to write for.' A 'come to Jesus' moment has the potential to be cringey to anyone who's had to sit through a Christian Godflix film where you are hit over the head with it.

Secondly as a UK consumer of US media, I don't think TV story telling is religiously apathetic especially when compared to ours.

My understanding of US faith in it's practice and it's interpersonal connection to people's lives in a way that's different from growing up in the UK comes from US media.

The problem is reactionary US Christians are blind to it. The West Wing was open to those themes, but was 'too elitist and liberal.'

The Simpsons is and was the show that has the exploration of religion and belief at it's core. They go to church. Lisa embraced Buddism and Bart earned his soul. But again, thirty years ago they were attacked by some for being 'unChristian

On 'Dead to Me' (great show) there's an affirming queer pastor who leads secular cast in prayer and there's a child of one of the leads finding faith because of it. Very well written and intersectional.

It's there.

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Benjamin Frank
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« Reply #6 on: January 02, 2022, 07:09:51 AM »
« Edited: January 02, 2022, 07:54:46 AM by Colin Robinson Frank »

1.Some of it could be because religious viewers have segregated themselves with religious themed television networks. To be sure, I don't know that these stations do any drama or comedy programs, but there is religious television.

2.Prior to Cable television starting sometime in the 1970s, there were initially just two major networks (NBC and CBS) and two smaller networks (ABC and Dumont) and in bigger cities an independent television station.  (It was these independent stations that carried syndicated programs like The Adventures of Superman, the first hit syndicated program.)

During this time, from 1955-1956 there was a highly regarded religious themed show that aired on ABC called 'Crossroads.'  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(1955_TV_series)

Many of the episodes are available on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDWi_wTtu9w&list=PLTKmp3L0wn-VajWnU7rfwklcKAfHxtgjW&index=2

3.Similar to Crossroads in being an anthology series was the program that was initially called The Fisher Family that aired on the Dumont Network and then on ABC from 1952-1956.  It then became known as This is the Life with new episodes airing in syndication on independent television stations and ran until 1988, I believe on a religious themed network.

4.I'm not sure about the 1960s in terms of new explicit religious themed shows, but many Westerns in the 1950s and shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek in the 1960s certainly implicitly touched on many religious themes.

There have been more recent explicitly religious shows. In the 1970s Little House on the Prairies was a popular show although in many ways it essentially became a parody of itself as it became little more than a 'what disaster can befall the family this week?' spectacle.

Also in the 1970s though, the show MASH featured Father Mulcahey who was treated with respect and reverence.  

In the 1980s, Michael Landon who starred in Little House on the Prairies came back with Highway to Heaven.

In the 1990s there was Touched by an Angel, a rather straightforward show about Angels providing miracles, and, on the other side, a more complex show that was both praised and criticized by organized religion called Nothing Sacred that was created and developed by a Jesuit Priest.

In the 2000, continuing in that more religious but sometimes critical of organized religion theme was Joan of Arcadia.

This is not an exhaustive list of all explicit religious themed drama programs that have aired on network television, but it is many of the main ones.

1.Crossroads
2.The Fisher Family/This is the Life
3.Little House on the Prairies
4.Highway to Heaven
5.Touched by an Angel
6.Nothing Sacred
7.Joan of Arcadia

I'm not familiar with many new programs after the early 2000s and I know nothing about cable or streaming programs.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #7 on: January 02, 2022, 11:47:12 AM »

An interesting example is The Good Place, which is a show literally about heaven and yet is deliberately secular and non-religious.

A major factor in that is how TV writers are an overwhelming secular group of people.

This is basically it.

Honestly, it likely comes down to it being more difficult for an irreligious person to relate or understand a character that's going through complicated religious struggles, but everyone can more or less follow when shows grapple with more universal or secular morality conflicts.

Sure, but the "universality" point can be made (with varying degrees of convincingness) about any writing focusing on anyone who isn't a heterosexual, able-bodied, agnostic or very vaguely Christian white man, and I think what Averroes is asking is why there's a push to allow more "specificity" in storytelling along all of those axes but one.

I do think there is less nonwhite or LGBT specifity than one might expect today, even. But I think a lot of the uncomfortableness comes from the idea that religious belief is in itself more absolutist/exclusivist than say gender, which would make its depiction more problematic. Portraying someone's religious belief positively is open to the interpretation that the show is making a statement that this is the right way to act or believe for everyone, which feels more controversial to showrunners than say about a struggle with say a character's personal sexuality ("gay agenda propaganda" conspiracies aside).
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« Reply #8 on: January 02, 2022, 01:45:05 PM »

This reminds me of something I noticed about Clarissa Explains It All even as a kid...it was the only Nickelodeon show from that era that explicitly stated the family was Christian and implied they were at least somewhat practicing, even though this was never a key plot point. Probably something Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel wouldn't allow on their live action kids shows today but kind of out of place even at the time.
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TheReckoning
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« Reply #9 on: January 02, 2022, 03:18:54 PM »

Because TV shows/movies/music genres are overwhelmingly dominated by what is considered “hip” in that very moment. For example, It’s currently considered very “hip” to have close LGBT friends (if not being LGBT yourself), which is why their is a lot of LGBT characters now in Netflix shows, even if they’re adapting a previous work which has no LGBT characters (see Fear Street). However, it’s definitely not considered hip to be religious, especially Christian. So for that reason, it’s just not likely to be a part of most TV shows, or media at all.
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John Dule
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« Reply #10 on: January 02, 2022, 03:50:41 PM »

I'm not convinced that Christians just want to see more Christians on TV. Rather, they want to see Christians portrayed on TV in a positive light. Modern TV shows (like Breaking Bad) are about exploring the moral assumptions we make about ourselves, and are often skeptical of objective morality. If a major Christian character were included in Breaking Bad, the show would have to make a choice about whether to portray that character trait positively or negatively. But we've already seen how the show portrays characters who purport themselves to be guided by strict moral compasses. The mustachioed twerp in this clip repeatedly espoused quasi-religious messages of forgiveness, but all this does is make him look hopelessly naive in the show's world.

Simply put, it would be hard for a show like Breaking Bad to portray Christians in a positive light, and even if it did, then it would come across like it was shilling for Christianity. So the answer is to just not address it at all (not explicitly, at least). And quite frankly, putting a Christian character in the show who actually acts morally would ruin the entire point of the series.
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Nathan
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« Reply #11 on: January 02, 2022, 07:00:37 PM »

The Simpsons is and was the show that has the exploration of religion and belief at it's core. They go to church. Lisa embraced Buddism and Bart earned his soul. But again, thirty years ago they were attacked by some for being 'unChristian

I thought of The Simpsons last night when thinking about this thread, yes! Even the episode with Bart converting to Catholicism, which came at a fairly gimmicky time in the show's history, is a lot better than a similar plot would probably be in most other shows. And of course "Homer the Heretic" is an all-time classic, as is "In Marge We Trust".
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Sol
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« Reply #12 on: January 02, 2022, 09:23:13 PM »

I do think Mad Men has a bit more discussion of religion than perhaps you're giving it credit for--I'm thinking in particular of the storyline in the 2nd season with Peggy and Colin Hanks. It's fairly clear that Peggy rejects the strict mores and guilt of the Church to a fairly large extent, but she's still influenced enough by Father Gil's suggestion of confession to admit her baby out of wedlock to Pete, even as she rebukes him. There's also of course fairly frequent discussion of Jewishness, though of course a lot of that comes through in a non-religious context.

Still, it's fair to say that Mad Men's not a super religiously attuned show--which in a lot of ways reflects the particular slice of society the show samples--famously secular and non-Protestant New York before the Fourth Great Awakening really picked up speed.
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« Reply #13 on: January 02, 2022, 10:14:10 PM »

I think I've said before that my favorite show is Survivor.  In recent years, there's been a lot of talk from Survivor fans about representation in casting, but that representation has not been extended to evangelical Christians.  I think the last contestant who was open about being an evangelical was Lauren O'Connell on Season 38 (three years ago).  And, the show didn't even really mention her faith, even though it apparently played a major role on the island, according to various contestants in interviews.  Whereas, in the old days of the show, they'd cast a lot more Christians and let their stories be told on the show.  Shan's faith was mentioned in Season 41, but it was a much more theologically progressive form of Christianity.

Now, I must acknowledge that Survivor has gone from a personal social experiment to a strategic game over the years.  But, in recent seasons, the show has gone back to addressing complex social issues and experiences in people's lives.  Having a few theologically and morally conservative evangelical Christians would enrich these conversations and allow viewers like me to see people who we can better relate to.
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Benjamin Frank
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« Reply #14 on: January 03, 2022, 01:06:39 AM »

I think I've said before that my favorite show is Survivor.  In recent years, there's been a lot of talk from Survivor fans about representation in casting, but that representation has not been extended to evangelical Christians.  I think the last contestant who was open about being an evangelical was Lauren O'Connell on Season 38 (three years ago).  And, the show didn't even really mention her faith, even though it apparently played a major role on the island, according to various contestants in interviews.  Whereas, in the old days of the show, they'd cast a lot more Christians and let their stories be told on the show.  Shan's faith was mentioned in Season 41, but it was a much more theologically progressive form of Christianity.

Now, I must acknowledge that Survivor has gone from a personal social experiment to a strategic game over the years.  But, in recent seasons, the show has gone back to addressing complex social issues and experiences in people's lives.  Having a few theologically and morally conservative evangelical Christians would enrich these conversations and allow viewers like me to see people who we can better relate to.

I think the skimpy attire of the Survivor contestants greatly limits the number of conservative Christians who would be willing to appear on the program.
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Sol
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« Reply #15 on: January 03, 2022, 09:54:21 AM »

I do think Mad Men has a bit more discussion of religion than perhaps you're giving it credit for--I'm thinking in particular of the storyline in the 2nd season with Peggy and Colin Hanks. It's fairly clear that Peggy rejects the strict mores and guilt of the Church to a fairly large extent, but she's still influenced enough by Father Gil's suggestion of confession to admit her baby out of wedlock to Pete, even as she rebukes him. There's also of course fairly frequent discussion of Jewishness, though of course a lot of that comes through in a non-religious context.

Still, it's fair to say that Mad Men's not a super religiously attuned show--which in a lot of ways reflects the particular slice of society the show samples--famously secular and non-Protestant New York before the Fourth Great Awakening really picked up speed.

These are good points. Religion is not completely ignored by Mad Men, although it's notable that it focuses on the same Catholicism/Judaism/Western Buddhism triad that I describe with respect to The Sopranos.

Don Draper also has that great moment in the final season when he sees the devil in the engineer who comes in to install the firm's new computer. Admittedly, the thrust of this scene is that Don is having a drunken outburst, but the form it takes is significant.



Maybe it's my own biases speaking, but I view this as one of the most important moments in the series and particularly crucial to the moment of revelation at the end in which he conceives of the Buy the World a Coke campaign. Don understands the cold and mechanized Tower of Babel that we are building for ourselves and the allure of offering an escape from that in something human.

I think the Catholic/Judaism/Western Buddhism aspect, as shared with the Sopranos, is mostly a side effect of the Tri-State area setting, though unlike the Sopranos Mad Men does of course have lots of WASP or North European characters who'd theoretically be Protestant. Though it's fairly realistic in showing most of those characters as thoroughly secularized.

It's been a minute since I've seen the back half of Mad Men to be honest, which I watched when it was airing while I was in High School and haven't rewatched since. I'm currently rewatching (early Season 3) and will probably come back to this thread once I get to that scene.
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« Reply #16 on: January 03, 2022, 10:08:03 AM »

Drop everything and go watch The West Wing. Come back after Two Cathedrals.
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« Reply #17 on: January 03, 2022, 10:21:37 AM »

There's actually a long-running theme in Mad Men - it is subtle in the earlier seasons but then becomes less so - which contrasts Don's religious feelings and sentiments (which are incoherent but intense, reflecting something of Depression-era evangelical revivalism in the places he grew up in) with those of the highly secularised milieu which he now inhabits and appears, on first glance, to reflect entirely himself.
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« Reply #18 on: January 03, 2022, 10:35:30 AM »

OP has no idea what he is talking about, the American program Veggie-Tales has proven itself to be extremely in-depth and rigorous in its scholarly approach to popular religion. Larry the cucumber, for instance, with his happy-go-lucky and optimistic attitude, appears to represent the prosperity gospel faction, whereas the introspective Bob the tomato is more of a Kierkegaardian.
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Secretary of State Liberal Hack
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« Reply #19 on: January 03, 2022, 11:33:14 AM »

I'm not convinced that Christians just want to see more Christians on TV. Rather, they want to see Christians portrayed on TV in a positive light. Modern TV shows (like Breaking Bad) are about exploring the moral assumptions we make about ourselves, and are often skeptical of objective morality. If a major Christian character were included in Breaking Bad, the show would have to make a choice about whether to portray that character trait positively or negatively. But we've already seen how the show portrays characters who purport themselves to be guided by strict moral compasses. The mustachioed twerp in this clip repeatedly espoused quasi-religious messages of forgiveness, but all this does is make him look hopelessly naive in the show's world.

Simply put, it would be hard for a show like Breaking Bad to portray Christians in a positive light, and even if it did, then it would come across like it was shilling for Christianity. So the answer is to just not address it at all (not explicitly, at least). And quite frankly, putting a Christian character in the show who actually acts morally would ruin the entire point of the series.


I also can't help noting that The Wire repeatedly presents support groups in a much more positive light, and that it's important that there isn't some mealy-mouthed pseudo-clinician present to delude people into believing that self-acceptance means that there is no content to their choices. It's also significant that, on that show, these groups almost always meet in churches.

The wire is fairly positive in it's portrayal of religion even if it's not a real core part of the story until the latter seasons. The black church is portrayed almost completely positively as a pillar of the community with a pastor being heavily involved in community projects and proving some of the few philantrophic services to actualy reach the underclass it explores.

https://thewire.fandom.com/wiki/The_Deacon
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« Reply #20 on: January 03, 2022, 05:42:48 PM »

I can't speak to all of the shows mentioned here, but my first time watching it, The Sopranos surprised me with its approach to religion. While we can all now say Carmella was an immense hypocrite, I felt that watching her pray for Chris when he was in the hospital in Season 2 was a jarringly different portrayal of religion than we would expect today. What I mean is that, even though we know Carmella isn't exactly living up to her moral responsibilities in several dimensions, her prayer, and her desire to see Chrissy survive, is sincere and heartfelt. In a contemporary TV show (say coming out sometime in the 2010s to present), I think this would have only been another chance to show that religious characters are hypocrites, morons, or monsters.

As for The Wire, which I just wrapped up rewatching, I feel that the relatively positive portrayal of religious figures is entirely due to the show's setting in a poverty-stricken city. That said, David Simon certainly could have portrayed preachers as grifters, something which he seems to actively avoid doing.

The Simpsons is and was the show that has the exploration of religion and belief at it's core. They go to church. Lisa embraced Buddism and Bart earned his soul. But again, thirty years ago they were attacked by some for being 'unChristian

I thought of The Simpsons last night when thinking about this thread, yes! Even the episode with Bart converting to Catholicism, which came at a fairly gimmicky time in the show's history, is a lot better than a similar plot would probably be in most other shows. And of course "Homer the Heretic" is an all-time classic, as is "In Marge We Trust".

My parents had never let I or my brother watch The Simpsons when we were kids (think 2000s). When I finally took it on myself to explore the canon last summer, I was struck by the show's religious content. Watching Bart feel like he wouldn't enter Heaven because he sold his soul had me internally screaming "What did they think they were 'protecting' us from!?"
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« Reply #21 on: January 03, 2022, 05:59:59 PM »

The Simpsons is and was the show that has the exploration of religion and belief at it's core. They go to church. Lisa embraced Buddism and Bart earned his soul. But again, thirty years ago they were attacked by some for being 'unChristian

I thought of The Simpsons last night when thinking about this thread, yes! Even the episode with Bart converting to Catholicism, which came at a fairly gimmicky time in the show's history, is a lot better than a similar plot would probably be in most other shows. And of course "Homer the Heretic" is an all-time classic, as is "In Marge We Trust".

My parents had never let I or my brother watch The Simpsons when we were kids (think 2000s). When I finally took it on myself to explore the canon last summer, I was struck by the show's religious content. Watching Bart feel like he wouldn't enter Heaven because he sold his soul had me internally screaming "What did they think they were 'protecting' us from!?"

Of course there's also, as Andrew points out, the episode where Lisa converts to Buddhism, which deals with the subject very well (including presenting Reverend Lovejoy as checked-out and hypocritical but in a sympathetic and even tragic way, something that the episode has in common with "In Marge We Trust"). This despite, again, coming at a period in the show's history where its credibility on subjects that weren't religion was already depleting fast; it of course has the Richard Gere cameo, increasing reliance on celebrity cameos having been one of the canaries in the coal mine for the show's decline.
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« Reply #22 on: January 03, 2022, 07:02:25 PM »

To add, the portrayal of Islam and Muslim Americans on TV post 9/11 in anything but an adversarial and discriminatory light was almost non-existent until recently. It's a better in the UK, but networks seem unwilling to take a risk on normalising everyday experiences.
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« Reply #23 on: January 03, 2022, 08:01:57 PM »

Not sure if this is a great answer, but I honestly think that most people subconsciously assume that every TV character is a bland form of Mainline Protestant (let's say Methodist) unless told otherwise or they have an obvious "tell" that they'd belong to another faith (e.g., Tony Soprano being Italian and therefore Catholic).  In an odd way, even as organized religion has "declined" in some ways, I think it still maintains a subconscious cultural hold with Christianity being the "default" - at least casually/culturally - for such a massive majority across nearly every state that it isn't seen is "unique" enough to explore?  C&E Club Christianity absolutely still dominates our culture, IMO.
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« Reply #24 on: January 03, 2022, 08:28:53 PM »

I have had this thought in the context of my being unable to relate to any character I have ever seen on TV. It's not that there's a lack of characters on television identified as Muslim (in fact, there are far more than the proportion of Muslims in the United States would suggest), but it appears to me that all of them are shown to be irreligious or in some significant way non-practicing. Maybe the intended purpose is to humanize those characters in the way that the writers know how, but its effect is to render those characters unrecognizable to me.

You see something similar in terms of the paucity of Mormon characters; there would be no way to guess from American non-sports television programming that there are as many Mormons in the United States as there are Jews. The sense I get is that for a character to be religiously secure forecloses on a great deal of dramatic potential and does not add anything useful in exchange.

That gets to the question of why it might be that religious characters could be difficult. My notion here (and this is speculative even compared to everything else) is that the sort of person who thinks in a serious way about the moral questions on which religion might have bearing is unlikely to turn to creating fiction if they have personal religious experience. More narrowly, I would think that it would be uncommon for religious people of this sort to become television writers. What leads me to believe this is that I have encountered very few fictional depictions (television or otherwise) of the experience of living with religious fate that have felt to me that they were based on any actual experiences on the part of the author. The Sopranos is an outlier in this respect; Carmela's religious experiences feel founded in real life.

The Sopranos does benefit from its religion being the one sort of religion that Hollywood has experience depicting. Since we've talked about Mad Men, we can bring up the one point that bothers the sort of person who posts on this site to no end: Peggy's family, despite being repeatedly identified as Norwegian, is shown to be Catholic. You can come up with ways to explain this away if you want, but it's something that does need to be explained away, and it suggests that that was the only kind of organized religion that the writers had any sense of how to depict.
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