Excitement on the Tube

It's a bit of a secret. Only those people who on Sunday are neither in church nor asleep nor buried in the papers know it: religious TV is more varied, skilled, sophisticated and imaginative than ever before.

Apart from pro football, in fact, there is mighty little that churches will not present these days for the greater glory of God. Last week CBS put on an hour-long concert of ecclesiastical jazz by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, video-taped at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The Southern Baptists, besides their soap-operatic mainstay series, The Answer, have cooperated with NBC to produce a spectacular life of St. Paul and a recreation of Biblical history called The Inheritance that drew more than 10,000 letters. Next year NBC and the Baptists will offer a major life of Christ. The Roman Catholic Paulist Fathers' Insight presents adult melodrama in half-hour playlets about abortion, divorce and alcoholism, featuring such stars as Raymond Massey, Vera Miles and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. NBC's The Catholic Hour is offering a four-part series on the Second Vatican Council and the future of church renewal.

Seduction & Brecht. No network has a monopoly on inventiveness. CBS's Look Up And Live recently presented a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, narrated by Kurd Hatfield, and last summer had a three-part series on the changing role of modern women in church and society called The Evolution of Eve. Scheduled for spring is a CBS special--a Brecht-like oratorio on Galileo and the Inquisition by Composer Ezra Laderman and Joe Darion, lyricist of the off-Broadway hit, Man of La Mancha. NBC's Frontiers of Faith will soon undertake a twelve-part series on modern ethics--including one program called "The Manly Art of Seduction," inspired by Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy. ABC's Directions offered a highly praised dramatization of the martyrdom of Jan Hus, the 15th century Bohemian reformer. Says Pamela Ilott, director of religious programming for CBS: "Our problem is not in coming up with new ideas but in finding enough Sundays to express them all."

Slices of Life. Not all religious television, of course, displays a richness of imagination. Some of the programs produced by the churches' own television divisions and syndicated to stations individually are almost as cliche-ridden as a Hollywood comedy series. The Missouri Synod's This Is the Life, which is shown on 375 stations, frequently features pious family dramas with all too obvious moral points. One recent slice of Life told of a critically ill boy who asked to see his father. The plot focused on the search for the man, a stevedore who had walked out on his family the year before, and ended with a tearful reconciliation and some moralistic repentance by Pop. Insight's producer, Paulist Father Ellwood Kieser, charges that much religious programming is marred by "superficial ideology," "shallow psychology," and--he cannot resist the pun--excessive reliance on the deus ex machina.

The underlying change in religious television between a decade ago and now is motive. Then the idea was to convert; now, says William Fore, director of broadcasting for the National Council of Churches, it is to "get people to take religion itself seriously, to show them there is a religious or moral dimension to everything they do, to challenge them to choose or reject Christianity for the right reasons." He contends that TV is becoming a "primary, rather than an auxiliary, evangelistic tool." The major obstacle is getting prime-time attention. The networks quite naturally save the best hours for more commercial shows, which means that religious programming is consigned to unwanted time slots on the Lord's Day. And far too many people, it seems, can't watch it then to save their souls.

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