Christianity Returns On TV, Both Good And Bad

Christianity Returns On TV, Both Good And Bad

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.

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