Yeah, I’m with you. It did have some funny lines and situations, Jesus was really cool, and it was, for once, different. However, it turned into a soap opera early on, and doubt if I’ll bother watching it again. Maybe it will improve in an hour slot.
I was bored after the first hour and turned it off. I thought that they were trying way too hard to be edgy.
Yeah, it was a bit crowded with plot threads, but that’s probably because it is the premiere. When it goes into a one hour show, it may get ‘less crowded’.
Damn it! I missed it. I was hangoung out with the people who live next door to me.
I read somewhere that only six episodes were planned. Maybe the producer is hedging his bets, or maybe the story he wants to tell fits into six hours. According to the article I read, the producer based the story on his partner’s family.
I thought it was going to be some sort of Desperate Housewives-type comedy-with-serious-overtones. A show that can be summed up as “the adventures of the world’s unluckiest Episocopalian priest” ought to be ripe for humor and pathos. But it was just so darned earnest that any trace of humor was sucked right out of it for me.
What that left was a pill-popping priest with a wife who drinks too much and is in denial, three kids each with their own problems, a mother with Alzheimer’s, a father who’s dating the priest’s boss, etc. etc.
In other words, a soap opera.
I agree, waaaay too many issues. Drug-dealing kid, gay kid, over-sexed adopted minority-race kid, with alcoholic mom and pill-poppng dad. Add in the embezzeling BIL and the Mafia Catholic buddies and it was way too soap opera-y for me.
And like Otto said, I thought the Jesus chats just dragged the show down.
And just what are they paying Episcopalian ministers these days, anyway? That was a damn nice house, plus he drives a Volvo, belongs to a country club and they seem to have a maid? I’d do a little more checking into that embezzeling.
Ah, but it’s a soap without whining. It’s like Picket Fences without all the angst. That puts it in the Watchable column for me.
I figured the house probably belongs to the church. My husband belongs to a country club, and he’s a lowly security guard. The maid – I want to know more about her. Maybe she came with the house.
The daughter’s story is puzzling though – from the way they live, it seems like she should have been able to come up with the money for her computer programs without selling pot.
The house came from the wife’s side of the family; in fact, she tried to take out a mortgage on it (to fund the school construction which was stalled because of the embezzlement) only to learn from the banker lady that her mother still held the deed.
As to the Volvo and the maid, I have no idea, but the country club membership (if it’s indeed his membership) may be a perk from the church or the club.
My mother, the incredibly socially and religiously liberal old lady that she is, watched this simply because she figured that if the conservatives hated it, she’d probably love it. She thought it was awful, though, just a total soap opera without any redeeming humor or entertainment value. I’m glad she saved me the two hours of my life that I might have otherwise wasted, because our tastes in programming are surprisingly similar.
I watched about a half hour of it but it lost me at the very beginning. Not because of the plotline, which looked to be interesting but for this blooper:
Church service was over and the Ellyn Bursten’s bishop character wanted to talk to Daniel (Aiden Quinn) about the sermon he had just given. A guy comes up, saying he really has to talk to Daniel and Ellyn Bursten says she’ll talk to him in the rectory and walks away. The guy hands Daniel a folded piece of paper and tells him that Daniel’s brother has absconded with the church’s money, some three million bucks.
Daniel unfolds the paper and sees that it is the cancelled check that his brother had supposedly endorsed for all that money. He tells the guy he’ll try to track his brother down and as the scene ends, you see him folding the check back up.
The next scene, Ellyn gives him her two cents on his sermon and Daniel says he has to go. The scene ends with Ellyn picking the check up from the desk that Daniel had only arrived at a moment earlier. This is supposed to be the same check as in the last scene but it’s obvious that this one has never been folded. It lies perfectly flat in her fingers with no fold lines to be seen.
I know I’m being nitpicky but this caused me to lose interest in the show. It really wasn’t up my alley anyway and I was watching because of the hype. My feelings aside, I still don’t think this show will go beyond the first six episodes, or at least the first season.
6 episodes would be the entire first season, FWIW.
I liked it a lot. Any predictions how long it will take before Jesus disses conservatives and/or evangelicals?
:smack: Yes, I realize that now. I only watched the first hour or so and then taped the rest. I got bored with it.
I’m not sure if I’ll watch it again.
I’m glad to see He held out for these first two hours… He’s mainly focused on gently chiding Fr. Daniel.
If I hear “[errant child] is a good boy/girl, but…” one more time, tho- I’ll scream. Can we have at least one “[errant child] is a whiny, manipulative, spoiled, etc turd, but…”
I’d really love it if Jesus said that!
Btw, I know it’s the cloying sentimentalist side of me, but I wanted Fr D’s Mom to notice JC & say Hi to Him as if it was the most natural thing in the world (like how Bob’s little boy was the only other one who could see God in God, The Devil & Bob).
I think the creators are deliberately leaving it to the viewers to decide for ourselves whether it’s really Jesus or if it’s a delusion or something else, so having another character see and react to Jesus would shut that door.
Conservative Episcopalian here. (Yes, I know that’s an oxymoron, we’ve all got our crosses to bear).
Jesus was pretty much the only character I liked. Aidan Quinn lost me when he was trying to defend his sermon to his bishop. He had said that maybe giving into temptation wasn’t such a bad thing, and when she called him on it he started to quote Corinthians (“There is no temtation that faces you but such that is common to man…”) and she cut him off, right before he got to the part of the verse that undermines his thesis – that God always gives you a way out of temptation so that you can bear it and not give in.
In fact, the Bishop was my favorite character until her affair with Quinn’s married father was revealed.
The show wasn’t that funny, there were way to many ‘issues’ crammed into it, and not a single likeable character (aside from Jesus). Wait, I take that back - the gay son was pretty likeable too.
God, I miss Joan of Arcadia. 
I flipped past this for a few minutes last nights. I couldn’t keep watching 'cause it has to have the worst dubbing I’ve ever seen. Anyone else notice this? I realize scenes are often rerecorded in the studio but the voices were so off, I suspect large portions of the dialogue had been rewritten.
In an editorial and a post on another board, the writers complain about “vicious gay-bashing”. I saw no gay bashing. I saw siblings good-naturedly teasing each other. Made me wonder if they watched a different show, or if nobody teased anybody in their families. Did you guys see gay bashing?
They also commented on the mother’s alcoholism and made it sound like she was a total tosspot. I saw a functioning mom who likes a martini or three with dinner. Maybe she’s alcoholic, but it seems that she’s managing to care for her family just fine.
The editorial also complained about the portrayal of Jesus as a long-haired hippie in white robes. WTF? He’s a dead ringer for the Jesus picture that most of us grew up with. Talk about type-casting.