It is almost certainly true that no person, regardless of religious commitment, has ever taken to the freeways with a bumper sticker that reads, \u201cWho took Christ out of the Christmas special?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Since the first breeding of reindeer, in other words, any special Christmas episode of a series might be described more or less as Thursday\u2019s hour of \u201cThe Office\u201d\u009d is summarized on NBC.com: \u201cA Benihana Christmas: The office sees two competing Christmas parties, and Michael is dumped for the holidays.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u201cER,\u201d\u009d 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 \u201cNip\/Tuck\u201d\u009d a few weeks ago \u201d\u201d as unlikely a place to go looking for sympathetic images of religious fealty as a swingers\u2019 club or any volume of Cattulus.<\/p>\n
Throughout the reign of \u201cTouched by an Angel\u201d\u009d 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 \u201cThe Book of Daniel\u201d\u009d Jesus showed up in a station wagon bearing wisdom and a willingness (presumably) to pump the gas.<\/p>\n
None of that anthropomorphism, which also distinguished the vague spirituality of \u201cJoan of Arcadia\u201d\u009d and charges on in TNT\u2019s \u201cSaving Grace,\u201d\u009d materializes on \u201cFriday Night Lights.\u201d\u009d 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.<\/p>\n