God Comes to Dinner

By Richard Zoglin

A 56-year-old widower (Robert Loggia) comes home from vacation with a surprise for his three grown children: a 30-year-old fiance. Since this is TV sitcomland, the May-September romance sends his kids into a wisecracking snit. Before dinner one evening, their barbs get so harsh that the fiance, known as TT, scurries into the hallway, casts her eyes skyward and asks for help: "Chief -- Code Blue, Code Blue! I knew they'd be upset, but this is ridiculous."

And whom, pray tell, is she talking to? There's no easy way to put this. It's God. Sunday Dinner, a new CBS series from TV trailblazer Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude), bills itself as the first sitcom to deal explicitly with religious faith. Lear says the series, his first in seven years, reflects a turn toward spiritual values in his own life. It also marks TV's effort to jump on Hollywood's spirituality bandwagon.

Much of Sunday Dinner, to be sure, goes for familiar secular laughs. Loggia and his fiance make jokes about their age difference; the kids pester Dad with nutty problems; middle-aged friends do double takes at Dad's young bride-to- be. This laugh-track world, however, is interrupted by TT's private chats with the Almighty. "How does anyone wake up on a morning like this and not believe in some version of you?!" she exclaims at the start of one episode. Loggia is wary but tolerant of her chirpy spirituality; the kids are overtly & skeptical. At one family dinner, TT describes her woozy mix of religion and environmentalism ("The natural world is the largest sacred community to which we all belong"). Comments one daughter: "She just turned left at Pluto."

Some conservatives have already objected to Lear's politically correct God. The Rev. Donald Wildmon, the Fundamentalist media watchdog, has attacked CBS for allowing Lear to "promote his New Age/secular humanist religion." (Idle thought: Is Wildmon now on the payroll of liberal TV producers, who use him to attract controversy -- and viewers -- to their shows?) It's hard to imagine many others being offended by the sappy sermonizing. Sunday Dinner doesn't engage the issue of religious faith so much as gawk at it: belief in God has become a character quirk, like having a funny job or being a witch. Lear has made a valiant effort to break one of TV comedy's last remaining taboos. But God has always been a better straight man.