.

[John Dule]

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.

David Chase likes to describe The Sopranos as a show about the country becoming so individualistic and self-centered that "even the mob can't take it anymore." This characterization holds up more generally: The early prestige dramas about male anti-heros are all shows about the growing selfishness of the post-war United States driving men crazy, along with the people who depend on them.

The funny thing about Jesse's experience with therapy is that it's an inversion of the "you can't say that you have never been told" scene with Carmela that I posted earlier. My viewing doesn't exactly mesh with yours here: The support group isn't ridiculous because it's "quasi-religious," it's ridiculous because its therapeutic relativism offers no moral framework at all.

There is a sense of right and wrong at Jesse's core, and every time Walt crosses a new line without feeling guilt, it's Jesse's absolutism that becomes the more central source of tension of the series. This makes the show perfectly amenable to religious interpretation despite its lack of focus on explicitly religious content.

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.

All of which is to say that I think what I'm describing has more to do with difficulty depicting religion in these series than in recognizing it in interpretation. None of the best shows on television are shy about using religious symbolism and there's a lot that would be difficult to make sense of thematically to someone ignorant of this country's major religious traditions.

I wasn't really clear with that post. My point is that whenever a character in Breaking Bad has a moral code of some sort, it's almost always violated, degraded, or brought into a situation in which it's clearly not applicable. If an explicitly Christian character were placed in the Breaking Bad world, their faith would have to be tested (and likely broken) in order for the show to maintain its cynicism and edge. I sincerely doubt Christians would actually like the results of seeing themselves reflected in that kind of show.

That said, BB does have some subtle Christian imagery (Jesse as a carpenter who "rises from the dead" at the end, for example).

[LabourJersey]

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.

This is pedantic, but it's clearly stated in Mad Men that Peggy's father was Norwegian and her mother is Irish Catholic.

You do bring up an interesting point as to whether Hollywood disproportionately depicts Catholicism over other Christian sects. Though I think a lot can be explained from the fact that the coastal cities have a lot of Catholics.

[RINO Tom]

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.

This is pedantic, but it's clearly stated in Mad Men that Peggy's father was Norwegian and her mother is Irish Catholic.

You do bring up an interesting point as to whether Hollywood disproportionately depicts Catholicism over other Christian sects. Though I think a lot can be explained from the fact that the coastal cities have a lot of Catholics.

As a Midwestern Protestant, I always find this hilarious.  The number of movie characters in rural Indiana who have a priest or something similar is such a comical East Coast perspective.

[LabourJersey]

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.

This is pedantic, but it's clearly stated in Mad Men that Peggy's father was Norwegian and her mother is Irish Catholic.

You do bring up an interesting point as to whether Hollywood disproportionately depicts Catholicism over other Christian sects. Though I think a lot can be explained from the fact that the coastal cities have a lot of Catholics.

As a Midwestern Protestant, I always find this hilarious.  The number of movie characters in rural Indiana who have a priest or something similar is such a comical East Coast perspective.

Fair point.

I guess there is a disconnect between the "Low Church" sensibilities of most US Protestants (to use an Anglican term) and the fact that the visual language of "High Church" is compelling in visual storytelling.

"Low Church" is centered around the belief that one does not need vestments, grand cathedrals, etc. to connect with God---one just needs faith and maybe people to guide you on that journey of faith. But it's more compelling in movies and TV to display visuals of faith that are totally different from the outside world--the kind you find in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, some kinds of Anglicanism, etc.

[RI]

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.

The Expanse, of all things, has a semi-sympathetic portrayal of practicing Mormons.

[Independents for Nihilism]

That said, BB does have some subtle Christian imagery (Jesse as a carpenter who "rises from the dead" at the end, for example).

Even more: Jesus would be an El Camino.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Fair point.

I guess there is a disconnect between the "Low Church" sensibilities of most US Protestants (to use an Anglican term) and the fact that the visual language of "High Church" is compelling in visual storytelling.

"Low Church" is centered around the belief that one does not need vestments, grand cathedrals, etc. to connect with God---one just needs faith and maybe people to guide you on that journey of faith. But it's more compelling in movies and TV to display visuals of faith that are totally different from the outside world--the kind you find in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, some kinds of Anglicanism, etc.

I've noticed this is a thing in Japanese anime: any representation of Christianity = Catholic, with nuns, priests and Gothic cathedrals.

[H. Ross Peron]

Fair point.

I guess there is a disconnect between the "Low Church" sensibilities of most US Protestants (to use an Anglican term) and the fact that the visual language of "High Church" is compelling in visual storytelling.

"Low Church" is centered around the belief that one does not need vestments, grand cathedrals, etc. to connect with God---one just needs faith and maybe people to guide you on that journey of faith. But it's more compelling in movies and TV to display visuals of faith that are totally different from the outside world--the kind you find in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, some kinds of Anglicanism, etc.

I've noticed this is a thing in Japanese anime: any representation of Christianity = Catholic, with nuns, priests and Gothic cathedrals.

Amusingly, one notable exception to this is Hellsing which depicts a vampire named Alucard (spell it backwards) working for a British government organization dedicated to fighting supernatural threats called the Royal Order of Protestant Knights and includes a storyline where they engage in battle with militant priests dispatched by the Vatican. Admittedly, besides the name there is nothing particularly Anglican about the organization unlike the Catholics who are depicted in clerical attire.

A lot of anime which depicts Christianity are set in medieval Europe and 19th Century France/Italy/Germany or fantasy settings inspired by them which probably encourages this.

[afleitch]

Japan bastardising western tropes always raises a wry smile.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On the wider issue here I do wonder if there's something to Andrew's observation about the existence in the United States of a parallel 'Christian' (by which we actually mean Evangelical) media, watched by people who mostly do not watch mainstream media and never watched by anyone outside the target demographic. It's easy to see how the existence of such a thing - and for such a long time as well - could have a 'pillarising' and polarising effect. This is a significant contrast with broadcasting culture in most European and other 'Western' countries where the tendency has traditionally been to try to cover all bases, particularly from the various large public broadcasters.* It might also explain some the odd tendency in so much of mainstream American cultural output to conflate organised Christianity as anything other than a basically alien antagonist with Catholicism.

_{*Except, of course, for 'pillarised' societies in the post-war and Cold War decades - Italy, the Netherlands and so on.}

[afleitch]

On that note, religious broadcasting in the UK was (and to some extent is) still an obligation, particularly on Sundays or before 'closedown' (yes...that was a thing I remember). For decades this was standard Anglican fare or Presbyterian in Scotland...('Hullo'. No one will get this.) This moved from somewhat 'square' worship to equally square but with cardigans and guitars. Then to broader 'philosophical' enquiry style programmes. It's not the sort of fare anyone would miss if it was gone.

Religion and faith portrayals are best showcased in plots or characters on the evening 'soaps' and done in a such a way it actually does it good service.

[bore]

('Hullo'. No one will get this.)

Wrong

[Benjamin Frank]

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.

Well, Lisa did check out Whiskey a God-God after all.

[Sol]

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.

This is pedantic, but it's clearly stated in Mad Men that Peggy's father was Norwegian and her mother is Irish Catholic.

I do think that has the scent of Matthew Weiner back-filling with a plausible but a bit contrived explanation, a bit like how it's initially implied that Joan and Roger had only been having an affair for a year but then it's retconned that they had been on and off again for many years. Mad Men is a show which is sociologically attuned to a really uniquely strong degree so you can really tell that something is a bit off, as in this case.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's fairly obviously a 'corrected' error, yes. There actually was a substantial Norwegian community in Bay Ridge in the 1960s, so giving Peggy Norwegian heritage was clearly not a random decision. At a guess they then decided that she should be Catholic as all (non-Jewish) White Ethnics in South Brooklyn at the time were, right? And that by the time they realised the error it was too late to backtrack entirely. Of course nothing could be done about the other error: if she's Norwegian it should be Olsen not Olson (which would be Swedish), but I suppose that one could be put down to the garbling of non-Anglophone surnames by officialdom that was so common once. And some Olsens did change their name to Olson, including this forum's Problematic Fave Floyd B. Olson.

[Ferguson97]

Why is it so rare to find complex depictions of religious characters and stories that take religion seriously?

Because this would appeal to a very niche audience, and there's no reason for TV producers to purposefully put themselves in this kind of corner.

[Sol]

Why is it so rare to find complex depictions of religious characters and stories that take religion seriously?

Because this would appeal to a very niche audience, and there's no reason for TV producers to purposefully put themselves in this kind of corner.

Most Americans are religious. And there's no reason to assume that nonreligious people wouldn't be interested in such stories.

[Ferguson97]

Why is it so rare to find complex depictions of religious characters and stories that take religion seriously?

Because this would appeal to a very niche audience, and there's no reason for TV producers to purposefully put themselves in this kind of corner.

Most Americans are religious. And there's no reason to assume that nonreligious people wouldn't be interested in such stories.

Many Americans who self-id as Christian don't go to church and don't really pray, which was my larger point. I just have a hard time imaging this kind of thing working as part of the TV show unless religion was like, part of the premise itself.

[John Dule]

Why is it so rare to find complex depictions of religious characters and stories that take religion seriously?

Because this would appeal to a very niche audience, and there's no reason for TV producers to purposefully put themselves in this kind of corner.

Most Americans are religious. And there's no reason to assume that nonreligious people wouldn't be interested in such stories.

Many Americans who self-id as Christian don't go to church and don't really pray, which was my larger point. I just have a hard time imaging this kind of thing working as part of the TV show unless religion was like, part of the premise itself.

Yeah, most Americans would probably call themselves "religious / spiritual," but would have a hard time describing what that means or articulating how it affects their daily lives.

[Хahar 🤔]

On the wider issue here I do wonder if there's something to Andrew's observation about the existence in the United States of a parallel 'Christian' (by which we actually mean Evangelical) media, watched by people who mostly do not watch mainstream media and never watched by anyone outside the target demographic. It's easy to see how the existence of such a thing - and for such a long time as well - could have a 'pillarising' and polarising effect. This is a significant contrast with broadcasting culture in most European and other 'Western' countries where the tendency has traditionally been to try to cover all bases, particularly from the various large public broadcasters.* It might also explain some the odd tendency in so much of mainstream American cultural output to conflate organised Christianity as anything other than a basically alien antagonist with Catholicism.

_{*Except, of course, for 'pillarised' societies in the post-war and Cold War decades - Italy, the Netherlands and so on.}

I'm not quite sold on this thesis in this context. When I see the word "pillarization" I think of a society all of whose cultural institutions exist in parallel. In America, this is partly true. I would say that the separation is most complete in literature. The most financially lucrative Christian cultural industry is music. It's telling that these two are relatively inexpensive to produce. There's also significant crossover between the Christian music industry and the mainstream music industry; everyone likes to talk about how Katy Perry used to be a Christian singer, but the actually significant moment here was Amy Grant crossing over from Christian pop to regular pop in the early '90s. It's not all that uncommon now for an act to straddle that line.

What this thread is about is scripted fictional programming. There is a market for explicitly Christian movies (God's Not Dead and Heaven Is for Real both made a lot of money on a small budget), but in spite of that, not a lot of movies like that get made. My guess would be that it's difficult to find capital to make that sort of movie, despite the enormous returns that are possible. (A more pronounced version of this is why Mormon film is a practically nonexistent genre.) What's more common is the sort of movie that's not explicitly Christian but is nonetheless marketed in a way where it's understood to be primarily for that market. A good example of this is the Kurt Warner movie that just came out.

To get to what this thread is explicitly about, which is television, the notion of pillarization doesn't seem quite right to me because Christian television doesn't really exist. Christian television channels that cater to the Evangelical Protestant market generally do not produce scripted fictional programming, presumably as a matter of cost. What strikes me is that there aren't even TV shows that cater to a Christian audience in the way that movies do. (That, I guess, is why this thread was created). When I was young there were two long-running and successful shows that I can recall with religious themes on network TV: Touched by an Angel and 7th Heaven. Now, as far as I know, there are none, and it does not appear that anything has replaced them.