Human, None Too Human

By James Poniewozik

There's an instructive scene early in Jesus (CBS, May 14 and 17, 9 p.m. E.T.) in which Roman soldiers insist that their insignia be displayed in Jerusalem's temple and the priests vow to die rather than let graven images inside. TV producers might do well to observe a similar proscription when it comes to the Bible, given their tendency to engrave religion as a greeting-card punch line (God, the Devil and Bob) or a pious, thundering bore.

Jesus wants to find a middle ground between irreverence and irrelevance, promising a Saviour (Jeremy Sisto) who laughs and emotes like the blue-collar rabble rouser he was in the New Testament. It takes steps toward greater realism, putting the political ferment of Christ's time in the foreground, but ends up a traditional, staid epic that is double-dipped in ham-fisted dramatics.

The drama of Jesus' story is that he is God and man; his body is passionately at odds with his soul. But many viewers prefer prim Bible stories (hence folks who deplored Harvey Keitel's Brooklynite Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ don't mind Hebrew Apostles who sound like British lords). Sisto gives them an Al Gore-like Jesus, who stiffly recites scriptural lines and whose chief means of showing emotion is shouting. He may laugh and cry, but so rigidly and unnaturally you end up hoping for a reappearance by the comparatively interesting Satan--played by both a woman (Manuela Ruggeri) and a man (Jeroen Krabbe)--who taunts Jesus with the atrocities that will be committed in his name.

That minor touch of daring is a hint of what CBS might have made of the New Testament's complex conflict. But as far as Jesus is concerned, that remains the greatest story never told.

--By James Poniewozik