Guess which program before you click.

These shows, we’re told by Hollywood, are “reality programs” reflecting “normal” families. They are, network executives would have us believe, more accurate depictions of the American family than fictional families of old: the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Huxtables, even the Simpsons. But when did any of our realities include buying a $9,000 grill like Denise Richards, or sitting down with our youngest daughter to watch a porn tape possibly starring our oldest child?

Completely missing from these shows is the one thing that keeps us tuning in, year after year, to reruns of Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show, the same ingredient that has kept The Simpsons on the air longer than any other sitcom in the history of television. At the end of It’s Complicated or Living Lohan we are not left with the belief that a family, headed by a wise and loving parent, will somehow come through its struggles better off and stronger for having worked through them together. Rather, we are left shocked at the complete and utter absence of a true parental figure and certain that, somehow, any problems those families encounter are largely caused by the parents themselves. If watching these shows leaves us with that same warm, fuzzy and affirmed feeling that the sitcoms of old did, it’s simply because ”” by comparison ”” our realities look so much more sane than theirs.

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Sydney Pollack’s career as a director blossomed in the 1960s and ’70s, but in many ways he was a throwback to an earlier era in American movies.

The story of the New Hollywood, dominated by a wild bunch of ambitious, iconoclastic would-be auteurs, is by now overgrown with nostalgia and legend-mongering, but Mr. Pollack’s place in that legend suggests continuity rather than upheaval. The vitality of motion pictures has always been sustained by craftsmen with a modicum of business sense and the ability to tell a good story. Mr. Pollack, who died on Monday at 73, was never (and never claimed to be) a great innovator or a notable visual stylist. If he could be compared to a major figure from the Old Hollywood, it would not be to one of the great individualists like Howard Hawks or John Ford, who stamped their creative personalities onto every project, whatever the genre or the level of achievement. Mr. Pollack was more like William Wyler: highly competent, drawn to projects with a certain quality and prestige and able above all to harness the charisma of movie stars to great emotional and dramatic effect.

Just about any film by Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, for instance, will be immediately and primarily identifiable as such, no matter who’s in it. But if you think of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” you’ll remember Jane Fonda, so desperate and defiant and sad as she pushes herself through a Depression-era dance marathon. “Tootsie” is Dustin Hoffman’s movie. “This Property Is Condemned” will conjure up Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, oddly cast but nonetheless generating Southern Gothic heat in an overripe Tennessee Williams scenario. And it is Mr. Redford who defines Mr. Pollack’s oeuvre nearly as much as the director himself. Over nearly 25 years, from “This Property Is Condemned” to “Havana,” they worked together on westerns (“Jeremiah Johnson,”); love stories both sweeping (“The Way We Were”) and intimate (“The Electric Horseman”); paranoid thrillers (“Three Days of the Condor”); and high-toned literary adaptations (“Out of Africa.”)

My favorite scene in all the movies is Mr. Pollack and Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie arguing over the latter’s skill and demeanor in playing a tomato. Read it all.

No one would mistake Ned Flanders, the goofy next-door neighbor in “The Simpsons,” for a polished televangelist like Joel Osteen. But over the past two decades the zealous cartoon character has become one of the best-known evangelicals on America’s small screen. With Americans spending exponentially more time on their sofas watching television than in pews listening to sermons, this is no insignificant matter.

In the inevitably intertwined world of religion and commerce, it’s only natural that the man portrayed as “Blessed Ned of Springfield” on the cover of Christianity Today magazine should have his own “new testament.” And so he does. “Flanders’ Book of Faith,” by “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, is a slim, illustrated entry in the show’s “Library of Wisdom” series.

For years, the TV show’s writers, fiercely protective of their reputation for irreverence, denied that they were in any way sympathetic toward sincere belief, as embodied by the Flanders character. But releasing the book under Mr. Groening’s name puts an imprimatur on that kind-to-religion interpretation, long held in younger evangelical circles.

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But these days, it seems the only thing worse than embarrassment, is obscurity.

—From an ABC news Nightline story on US Weekly

The big problem is that when Aslan finally appears, only Lucy can see him and her visions are mysterious and highly personal.

The youngest queen faces a frustrating paradox that is at the heart of the book’s message. As she grows older, Aslan will grow in stature and power, yet it also requires more faith to see and follow him.

“The thing is, Narnia isn’t a game” for the children, said Georgie Henley, the 12-year-old actress who plays Lucy. In the context of Lewis’ parable, “It’s a real world. Although Aslan fades for a while, when he comes back he’s stronger than ever and he’s bigger than ever.

“I love that saying, you know: ‘As long as you grow, so shall I.’ ”

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Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose experiences inspired the movie The Killing Fields, died Sunday at age 65. Pran coined the term “Killing Field” after seeing the remains of victims of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Actress Helen Mirren has played countless royals ”” Cleopatra, Queen Charlotte, Queen Elizabeth I and II.

It’s no coincidence. Aristocracy is in the blood, she tells Renee Montagne. Even the working class women in her family were “queenly.”

Her new memoir, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, outlines her aristocratic beginnings, from a time before the Mirren family was known as such, until she found a very special “religion” ”” the theater.

No matter how perfectly she may play a queen, however, she admits that she still gets intimidated when she gets a script and sees the “enormous number of lines” she has to learn.

Listen to it all from NPR.

The year was 1990, I had just started my doctorate at Oxford, our daughter was one year old, and life was stressful as well as lonely. One of the brightest lights during that time was the wonderful and too little known film Truly, Madly, Deeply, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman. It lifted our spirits and we both remember it as if it were yesterday. If you ever get a chance, see it. In the meantime listen to this story about the film’s marvelous director from NPR –KSH.

On a recent Saturday night, I went to the movies. Walking past the theater showing “I Am Legend” (plague kills most of humanity), I opted to watch “Cloverfield” (inexplicably angry alien destroys Manhattan) instead. After sitting through back-to-back previews for “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (ancient truce between Hell and Earth is revoked, resulting in mass destruction) and “Doomsday” (lethal virus ravages England, a disease-ridden cinematic cousin to “28 Days Later” and “Children of Men”), I found myself disturbed. The End of Days suddenly seemed imminent. Should I cancel my post-movie dinner reservation? What’s with all this apocalyptic entertainment, I wondered, and what does it say about those of us who are filling the theater seats?

Apocalypse-themed films proliferate, according to Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, former communications director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because they “reflect an idea that haunts the human imagination . . . a sense that this world is not permanent and faces some kind of comeuppance. Once it was thought that only God could bring that about. Today, we believe we can do it ourselves, due to the power placed in our hands by science or by our irresponsible behavior toward the environment.”

Rabbi Azriel Fellner, a free-lance film critic based in Livingston, N.J., agrees that the films may have more resonance because of recent advances in human capabilities, but he points to the current political environment as the source of these apocalyptic fantasies. Politicians, he notes, regularly mention the threat of nuclear war, or chemical or biological attack, and our imaginations start working overtime.

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[KIM] LAWTON: In Los Angeles, Jonathan Bock runs a company called Grace Hill Media, which he says tries to bridge the gap between Hollywood and the religious community. Formerly with Warner Brothers, Bock now promotes big-budget films to churches and Christian leaders.

Mr. BOCK: We have a database of about 75,000 pastors that we regularly invite to screenings. We don’t want to be in a position of just telling them this is good for you, so there you go. We want them to find out for themselves.

LAWTON: Last year, in a promotional gimmick, Bock’s company convinced the evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today to run a mock-cover featuring the film “Evan Almighty.” He says the studios’ willingness to commit such big ad money shows Hollywood’s growing respect for the religious audience.

Mr. BOCK: They knew this audience was out there. They really thought, you know, that this film would resonate with Christian families.

LAWTON: But “Evan Almighty” wasn’t a box office hit. Neither were two other movies targeted to Christians, “The Nativity Story” released in 2006 and “Amazing Grace” in early 2007, although all did better in video sales and rentals.

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But if there’s a flaw in the movie, it’s in how dashing Douglas’ character is.

“The idea that Gekko was this shiny, beautifully dressed, magnetic, charismatic superstar suited a lot of people in the business world very nicely,” says screenwriter Stephen Schiff, who’s writing a sequel to the movie.

Although Bud Fox ultimately turns against him and Gekko heads to jail, the character’s charisma undercuts the film’s moralizing.

“What do you want to be coming out of the movie? Do you want to be Bud Fox, broken and downtrodden and never having quite made it?” asks Schiff. “Or do you want to be Gordon Gekko, who, yeah he’s going to jail, but what a swashbuckler he was until the very last moment?”

Both Douglas and Stone have said that a lot of young people they meet see Gekko as a role model. But George David Smith, a business historian who teaches at NYU’s Stern School, says that Gekko is definitely not a capitalist hero. Gekko, says Smith, would have more trouble operating today because regulators pursue that kind of manipulation more aggressively.

Audiences may get a chance to see how Gekko would fare in today’s economy. A sequel to Wall Street, called Money Never Sleeps, is in the works.

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A row has erupted over “Vatican interference” after the Italian Synod of Bishops appealed to actors to exercise their consciences and refuse to take part in “vulgar and destructive” erotic scenes in films.

The appeal follows public condemnation by the bishops of an explicit sex scene in Caos Calmo, starring the Italian actor and director Nanni Moretti, which has just been released. In the film, directed by Antonello Grimaldi, Moretti plays a television executive who experiences a mid-life crisis after the death of his wife in the course of which he has a torrid affair with a woman he saves from drowning.

Father Nicolò Anselmi, head of the youth section of the Italian Bishops Conference, said that Moretti was normally noted for his “idealistic and sensitive” films. But the “gratuitous” sex scene with Isabella Ferrari, his co-star, would have an undesirable effect on the “impressionable young” since it was shown without any context involving love or tenderness.

Franco Zeffirelli, the film and opera director, said: “The Church is full of pedants who have lost all sense of proportion.” It was a “fourth-rate” film that did not merit the publicity generated by the bishops’ intervention.

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“Amazing Grace,” the big-budget film that traced the life of abolitionist William Wilberforce, won Most Inspiring Movie of 2007 and Best Movie for Mature Audiences at the 16th annual Movieguide Faith and Values Awards on Wednesday in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The film stars Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce, a member of Parliament who fought to end the slave trade in the 18th century British Empire.

The historical drama from Samuel Goldwyn Films beat out other nominees including “Bella,” “I Am Legend” and “Spider-Man 3” among others.

It was awarded the $50,000 Epiphany Prize, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, which provides $100,000 annually to films and television shows that reflect a “dramatic increase in either man’s love of God or man’s understanding of God,” according to the Web site for Epiphany Prizes.

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Religion and Hollywood normally don’t sound like mix well — but a Baptist church in Shreveport hopes it will be a good fit.

And Summer Grove Baptist — which built its sanctuary out of an old shopping mall — doesn’t always go by the book.

The church is thinking about selling part of its property to a new film institute and studio. They would exist side-by-side — with the film studio making “family friendly” films with a Christian message.

The congregation votes on the idea next Sunday.

Summer Grove, which moved into the old South Park Mall three years ago, is considering a proposal by the Louisiana Film Institute and Fountain Bridge Studios to buy part of the mall. It’s talking about paying the church approximately $2 million a year over 30 years.

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THE movie “Juno” is a fairy tale about a pregnant teenager who decides to have her baby, place it for adoption and then get on with her life. For the most part, the tone of the movie is comedic and jolly, but there is a moment when Juno tells her father about her condition, and he shakes his head in disappointment and says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.”

Female viewers flinch when he says it, because his words lay bare the bitterly unfair truth of sexuality: female desire can bring with it a form of punishment no man can begin to imagine, and so it is one appetite women and girls must always regard with caution. Because Juno let her guard down and had a single sexual experience with a sweet, well-intentioned boy, she alone is left with this ordeal of sorrow and public shame.

In the movie, the moment passes. Juno finds a yuppie couple eager for a baby, and when the woman tries to entice her with the promise of an open adoption, the girl shakes her head adamantly: “Can’t we just kick it old school? I could just put the baby in a basket and send it your way. You know, like Moses in the reeds.”

It’s a hilarious moment, and the sentiment turns out to be genuine. The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby ”” safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother ”” all but forgotten. Because I’m old enough now that teenage movie characters evoke a primarily maternal response in me (my question during the film wasn’t “What would I do in that situation?” but “What would I do if my daughter were in that situation?”), the last scene brought tears to my eyes. To see a young daughter, faced with the terrible fact of a pregnancy, unscathed by it and completely her old self again was magical.

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Tom Cruise has become the Church Of Scientology’s second-in-command, according to a new biography.

British writer Andrew Morton, best known for his books about the late Diana, Princess of Wales and David and Victoria Beckham, claims the 45-year-old Hollywood superstar’s life has been taken over by the controversial religion.

In “Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography,” Morton alleges the “church,” founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, relies so heavily on Cruise’s celebrity to recruit followers, the actor is now considered second only to leader David Miscavige.

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Dr Baehr, in Australia for a family wedding, spoke to Christian media and filmmakers in Melbourne and Sydney at the weekend. “Who controls the media controls the culture,” he says.

Dr Baehr’s message to the studios is simple: sex and violence don’t pay, but affirming positive values does.

The average family-values blockbuster ”” limited violence and sex plus a positive message ”” earns $US200 million ($A228 million) at the box office in the US, whereas big releases pushing atheism ”” he nominates The Golden Compass and There Will Be Blood ”” average only $US16 million, he says.

The Golden Compass ”” the $US200 million screen adaptation of Philip Pullman’s anti-religion children’s novel, released in Australia on Boxing Day ”” flopped in the US, while There Will Be Blood offers vicious anti-Christian stereotypes, Dr Baehr says.

“One of the big things we’ve done is dispel the myth that sex, violence and profanity is what people want. The figures show it’s not,” he says, arguing that 151 million people are in church in the US every Sunday, while 28 million are at the cinema.

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Having finally seen The Golden Compass, it’s easy to see why this film is likely to point anywhere but towards profit. The story revolves around street-scamp Lyra Belacqua coming into the possession of a fabled Golden Compass and setting off to rescue her friends from a laboratory in the frozen north run by some decidedly religious tyrants. In [Philip] Pullman’s books the bad guys are clearly presented as ”˜The Church’ through all ages and worlds. New Line Cinema has rather bizarrely acted to preserve its market share in the Christian heart-land of America by removing all mention of ”˜The Church’ and substituting the Roman Catholic term ”˜The Magesterium’. However the religious symbology remains, right down to one head quarters of the evil organization looking decidedly like an Orthodox church.

As a film The Golden Compass has significant problems. The script is unlikely to satisfy fans of the series or newcomers. Director and screenwriter Chris Weitz clearly lacked confidence in his audience, constantly feeling the need to repeat dialogue and hammer in plot points. Little effort has been made though to pair down the complexity of Pullman’s original tale so that paradoxically, while much is reiterated, other plot developments are skipped over so quickly that an understanding of the plot line before you see the film is about the only way you will follow what is happening. The result is a colour-by-numbers piece that will still leave people whispering to each other, “But I thought he was the bad guy”¦?”

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Another example is Pullman’s portrayal of the Judeo-Christian God. Pullman refers to him as “The Authority,” although a number of passages make clear that this is the God of the Bible. The Authority is a liar and a mere angel, and as we discover in the third book, senile as well. He was locked in some sort of jewel and held prisoner by the patriarch Enoch, who is now called Metatron and who rules in the Authority’s name. When the children find the jewel and accidentally release the Authority, he falls apart and dies.

Additionally, Pullman uses the imagery of C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” chronicles. “His Dark Materials” opens with the young heroine stuck in a wardrobe belonging to an old academic, conversing with a talking animal, when she discovers multiple worlds. So the young reader is lulled early on with the familiar feel of Lewis.

Nevertheless, Pullman’s work isn’t simply about using fairy-tale magic to tell a good story. He openly proselytizes for atheism, corrupting the imagery of Lewis and Tolkien to undermine children’s faith in God and the Church.

Q: Many Catholics, including William Donohue of the Catholic League, are speaking out against the movie. What should parents know before they let their children watch this film?

Vere: I don’t recommend any parent allow their children to view the film. While the movie has reportedly been sanitized of its more anti-Christian and anti-religious elements, it will do nothing but pique children’s curiosity about the books. I’m a parent myself. My children would think it hypocritical if I told them it was OK to see the movie, but not to read the books. And they would be right.

It’s not OK for children — impressionable as they are — to read stories in which the plot revolves around the supreme blasphemy, namely, that God is a liar and a mortal. It is not appropriate for children to read books in which the heroine is the product of adultery and murder; priests act as professional hit men, torturers and authorize occult experimentation on young children; an ex-nun engages in occult practices and promiscuous behavior, and speaks of it openly with a 12-year-old couple; and the angels who rebel against God are good, while those who fight on God’s side are evil. This is wrong. And while it’s been softened in the movie — or at least that’s what Hollywood is telling us — it’s still there in the books.

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An estimated 50 million children in the Arab world woke up this Monday to an early Christmas gift–a new Christian television station with 24-hour program designed just for them.

SAT-7 KIDS is the third channel offered by SAT-7, a Christian satellite network made by and for people living in the Middle East, and the first and only channel dedicated to locally made Christian programming targeted to Arabic children.

The station covers the entire Arab world, 22 countries and five time zones. More than 100 million children under age 15 live in that area, and half have access to satellite TV.

“I had tears in my eyes when the KIDS channel came on the air,” said Rita El Mounayer, director of Arabic programming for SAT-7. “I cried because of God’s blessings. I was so happy to see the SAT-7 KIDS channel finally on the air. It’s amazing to see it, and amazing that God uses imperfect vessels like us to bring about things like this.”

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It is almost certainly true that no person, regardless of religious commitment, has ever taken to the freeways with a bumper sticker that reads, “Who took Christ out of the Christmas special?”

Episodic television has always celebrated Christmas the way secular humanists and the neglectfully faithful have: with overcooked turkey, undercooked turkey, too much bourbon, not enough bourbon, mind games, debt, farcical airport delays, injurious gift giving, fractured compromise, teary problem solving, newly found bastard children and the lewd mistletoe enticements to sexual distraction that result in those children.

Since the first breeding of reindeer, in other words, any special Christmas episode of a series might be described more or less as Thursday’s hour of “The Office” is summarized on NBC.com: “A Benihana Christmas: The office sees two competing Christmas parties, and Michael is dumped for the holidays.”

This year, however, the annual adventures in December hedonism come at the end of a fall television season that has taken a vivid interest in Christian faith, portraying it with a variety and complexity, reverence and irreverence, for which it is hard to find previous parallels. It is one thing for a practitioner of Christian Science to wind up as a patient on NBC’s “ER,” screaming against penicillin, but it is another for a plastic surgeon with a bleak soul to rediscover his faith, go to church and thank God for delivering him to an overdosing woman in time to save her life. This happened on the FX series “Nip/Tuck” a few weeks ago ”” as unlikely a place to go looking for sympathetic images of religious fealty as a swingers’ club or any volume of Cattulus.

Throughout the reign of “Touched by an Angel” and network efforts after the 2004 election to reach newly discovered demographics in places like Alabama, Christianity was just a synonym for mysticism and mundane visitation. On the short-lived 2006 series “The Book of Daniel” Jesus showed up in a station wagon bearing wisdom and a willingness (presumably) to pump the gas.

None of that anthropomorphism, which also distinguished the vague spirituality of “Joan of Arcadia” and charges on in TNT’s “Saving Grace,” materializes on “Friday Night Lights.” That series (Fridays on NBC) has given us as close an approximation of religious conversion as any on television, without pandering or patronizing, imagining born-again Christianity in all its challenges and consolations.

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Days after its publication, a largely positive review of The Golden Compass that appeared in Catholic newspapers across the country was retracted this week by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The bishops, who could not be reached for comment, offered no explanation for the decision. But Catholic groups, including the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, have urged moviegoers to boycott the film, saying the film and the book on which it is based are anti-Catholic.

“Certainly, there was all kinds of speculation from the day it went up [on the Web site] as to whether or not something like this would happen,” said Jim Lackey, general news editor for the Catholic News Service, a wire service run by the bishops’ conference. He was told Monday to remove the review from the service’s Web site.

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The plot sounds familiar: movie takes on religion, angers some faction of believers.

But the furor surrounding “The Golden Compass,” a $180-million fantasy epic coming to theaters next Friday, is more complex than that.

Based on the first volume in the award-winning trilogy “His Dark Materials” by religious skeptic Philip Pullman, the movie already has been condemned by conservative Roman Catholics and evangelicals. They say it will hook children into Pullman’s books and a dark, individualistic world where all religion is evil.

But at least one liberal scholar has called the trilogy a “theological masterpiece,” and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rates the film “intelligent and well-crafted entertainment.”

Meanwhile, some secularists complain the movie from New Line Cinemas waters down Pullman’s religious critique. They feel sold out by the author, who has described himself as both an atheist and agnostic.

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Genius Products, Inc. is proud to present “Wordplay,” the critically acclaimed documentary, on DVD for the first time on November 7, 2006. “Wordplay” is an artfully constructed film that provides an in-depth behind the scenes view of the New York Times crossword puzzle and the current and historical creative forces that drive its production. Director Patrick Creadon treats this ordinary form of self-amusement as a spectator sport filled with rugged down-and-acrossers in hot pursuit of attaching words to terse definitions.

Elizabeth and Selimah caught this in the hotel room during thanksgiving vacation and I am now watching the DVD which we ordered through Netflix. Well worth the time–KSH.

For those of you with HBO, Five Days is really worth the time.

Russell Crowe, who is 43, says he’s planning to be baptized. “I’d like to do it this year,” the Oscar-winning actor tells Men’s Journal. “My mom and dad decided to let my brother and me make our own decisions about God when we got to the right age. I started thinking recently, `If I believe it is important to baptize my kids, why not me?”’

Crowe says the baptism will take place in the Byzantine chapel he built at his country ranch in Australia for his wedding to Danielle Spencer in 2003. The couple have two sons, 3-year-old Charlie and 1-year-old Tennyson.

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“We’re happy to offer ourselves up to show people that Christians come in many different stripes,” said [Kate] Lewis, a minister at St. Cross Episcopal Church in Hermosa Beach. “Some of us are progressive and inclusive.”

The potential for a million-dollar cash prize, along with a globe-spanning adventure, didn’t hurt, either.

“We are very serious about our relationship with God, and we are very serious about winning this race,” Hendrickson said. “We’re not afraid to have a good time, either. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun.”

The pair certainly stand out among this season’s lineup of two-person teams. Amid the cast of brothers and sisters, co-workers and heterosexual couples, Lewis and Hendrickson are the first lesbian team to compete on the show. The fact that they are both ordained ministers adds to their mystique.

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What does capture the popular imagination is the drama that led to the creation of hell. Ray Griggs, a film producer in Simi Valley, Calif., is trying to raise the $160 million he says it will cost to film his trilogy on the fallen archangel Lucifer, described at www.luciferthemovie.com. An eight-minute film short won a best animation award at the 2007 Beverly Hills Film Festival.

Mr. Griggs is marketing his project as a drama about the fall of the most exalted created being in the universe, whose ambition corrupted his judgment, alienated him from other angels and caused him to foment division in heaven.

“I want to tell how he fell from pride, about the great battle in heaven, his dislike for Christ, his control over humans and his final end,” Mr. Griggs said. “But I didn’t want the stereotypical Christian film. I have made an exciting action and adventure story out of Lucifer, one that has really great biblical principles.”

This kind of backdoor approach may be one of the few ways people feel comfortable bringing up hell.

“While the church isn’t talking about hell, the very best people in the culture are,” Mr. Harmon said. “The single best depiction of hell in the 20th century is Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit.’

“In the 19th century, there was a moral revolt inside the church against the God of the Bible, so the emphasis of theology on judgment, sin, hell and the wrath of God all got thrown into question. Now when I talk about it, I ask people when [was] the last sermon you heard on hell. It is always a small number. And it’s usually the Baptists who’ve heard about it.

“But you cannot dislodge hell out of Christianity. If salvation means anything, there has to be something from which you are saved. It is a crucial part of the overall faith fabric but culturally the church has lost that.”

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“Viva Laughlin” on CBS may well be the worst new show of the season, but is it the worst show in the history of television?

It certainly comes close in a category that includes “Beverly Hills Buntz” in 1987 (Dennis Franz in a short-lived spinoff of “Hill Street Blues”), the self-explanatory “Manimal” in 1983 or last year’s one-episode wonder, “Emily’s Reasons Why Not.” “Viva Laughlin” is not even in the same league as “Cop Rock,” a 1990 experimental series created by Steven Bochco that leavened a gritty police drama with Broadway musical moments: cops and criminals breaking into song and dance. “Viva Laughlin” also features musical outbursts and is far worse.

It may be just me, but I don’t think she liked the show. Read it all.