January 10, 2006, 8:04 a.m.
The Book of Daniel
TV only Jesus could love.

By Louis Wittig

There are two reasons why it’s important to know what writer Jack Kenny was thinking when he came up with NBC’s new hackle-raising drama The Book of Daniel.

“I've always wanted to write a story about a priest,” he told the press, “not as a man of the cloth or about religion but about family — about a guy with a family who had the extra spotlight on him, without having to be perfect all the time.”

First, this can put to rest the suspicion that will have settled on anyone who watched the show’s two-hour kickoff last Friday: that The Book of Daniel wasn’t written by a human being, but by a software package — Midseason Pro 3.0 — that had been set to blend scripts from Desperate Housewives and Seventh Heaven. Second, it helps explain why Daniel isn’t the anti-religious agitprop its faithful detractors claim. It’s something far less watchable than that.

Kenny’s priest is Reverend Daniel Webster (Aidan Quinn), an Episcopalian clergyman on the edge. Webster is married to WASPy, problem drinking Judith (Susanna Thompson), and barely presides over a roster of problems masquerading as supporting characters: a gay son (Christian Campbell), a misunderstood teen daughter (Allison Pill), a mother with Alzheimer’s, a racist parishioner, and too many more. There is one standout character though, Jesus (Garret Dillahunt).

Slow and thoughtful Daniel is not: The opening credits fade into him bailing his daughter out of jail. His bishop yells at him for giving a sermon where he asked, “Temptation. Is it really so bad?” His brother-in-law runs off with $3.2 million in church funds (leading him to ask a favor of Father Frank, a nun-ogling, Cadillac-driving Catholic priest who is a cartoon of a cartoon of Tony Soprano: “I’m not asking you to have him whacked,” Daniel tells Frank. “Yeah, but I got to get in touch with the same people.”) His sister-in-law falls into a lesbian affair with his brother-in-law’s secretary/accomplice and Peter, the gay son, well…he doesn’t really do anything, but he remains gay throughout and the camera latches onto that like it were some kind of subplot. It’s too much to take seriously and not enough to laugh at. Each character reacts to the over-the-top tilt-o-whirl by mugging, their one-dimensional purpose being to show how messed up a priest’s life can be.

Intermittently, Jesus (technically it’s not Jesus; just a personification of Daniel’s inner-dialog with the Lord) appears beside Daniel and the two shoot the breeze. Given how perfunctory the rest of the cast is, Jesus is a surprisingly non-obtrusive presence at first. Laid back, the Son of God gives “the kids are all right” type advice and is generally likeable albeit substance-less. Until late in the first episode, however, when he starts popping up in every other camera sweep making worthless quips.

This upset the American Family Association, which cried anti-Christian bigotry and called for a boycott. Four affiliates across the South and Midwest dropped the show. Those that carried it were swamped by calls and e-mails. These detractors thought Daniel was mocking Christianity by supposing that all this dysfunction was a natural result of Church attendance, and that believing Christians like the one’s portrayed were more or less hypocrites.

Remember what Kenny said about this being a show about a family. It’s true. No one behind Daniel seems to have been overly interested in saying anything about religion or religious people — good or bad. Daniel might have been worth a look if they did. The show aspires to be a serious HBO drama. It’s really an awful sitcom (albeit with pretentiously serious impulses.) And in it, church and faith are just the situations around which the gags are plotted. For all the farcically improbable problems that swamp them, none of the characters are worried about what God thinks of them: They’re worried about what the neighbors think. It’s the same family-based stuff you’ve seen a thousand times before. Sure, Jesus pops in an out. But for all he adds to the story, he might as well been a stock wacky-neighbor-with-stage-advice alá Wilson of Home Improvement. It would probably be possible to tease some religious message from Daniel’s mess — something like God loves those who love themselves; Jesus is chill — but not worthwhile.

In a way that gives the show a lazy, disconnected feeling, Daniel'’s creators don’t even seem to care about the textual details that make life in a priest’s family different from life in an accountant’s family. In almost every shot, Daniel is wearing his collar: at home, at the dinner table, in the car. Do Episcopal priests really do that? Ah, who cares?

Network television can’t compete with premium cable when it comes to edgy. And deep down in Daniel’s embarrassing, muddled attempt viewers might rightly sense a latent hostility to organized religion. The way its writers pile one preposterous, undeveloped plot twist on top of another suggests they’ve forsaken any attempt at verisimilitude and are somehow getting a rise in making their cleric more heavily plagued than a pharaoh.

Thankfully, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and the story of The Book of Daniel shows that He is ultimately merciful to the agitated faithful (and those unfortunate enough to be accidentally tuned into NBC on Friday nights). The network only ordered eight episodes, effectively canceling the show before it aired. Amen.

— Louis Wittig is a writer living in New York City.

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