I am not a religious woman. I was never a big-city girl trapped in a small, Christian town, nor did I “catch atheism” when I came to college. Regardless, every Sunday night for years my younger sister and I would plop down on the couch and watch CBS’s God-drama Touched By An Angel. When she wasn’t working, Mom would watch, too, as would 20 million other Americans every week.
Touched By An Angel ran from 1994 to 2003, practically throughout my entire childhood; notably, this niche drama ran just one season fewer than Friends. One-part700 Club, one-part workplace sitcom, Touched followed the life—or, afterlife—of an amateur “case-worker” angel named Monica, played by Roma Downey. God sends Monica to earth to guide people at crossroads in their lives. In turn, her supervisor Tess, played by minister, gospel singer, and talk show host Della Reese, guides Monica through these encounters and, of course, soulfully sings the show’s theme song. The angels can communicate with God but are, in their embodied form, practically human. They even drive a red Cadillac Eldorado convertible.
Considering that I watched for a significant portion of my formative years (211 episodes at one hour each: a frightening amount of time), I have a startlingly poor memory of the program. I do not remember much by way of specific episodes—though the case of the rock star single-dad immediately jumps to mind—nor do I know if there were larger, seasonal story arcs beyond Monica vaguely improving her angel-technique. I remember very clearly, however, that Monica had a square jaw and an Irish accent. My sister and I would mercilessly mimic her, repeating her almost parodically sincere catchphrase “God loves you” enough times to drive our mother mad but too few to actually develop passable Irish accents. We also failed to develop an interest in the God part of that phrase.
I remember the first time Monica appeared on screen. She was walking barefoot through the desert past a rattlesnake and a white dove. Clearly, Touched did not excel at subtlety. About seven times every episode, somebody said “somebody” while pointing upward, gesturing to God. Some mortal’s mother was always dying in a car crash or a freak “career-woman neglecting her husband and children” accident. Someone was always stealing from the elderly. Shaky strings plucked away at a cheesy adult-contemporary score. “God loves you, God loves you.”
We weren’t watching Touched then like we sometimes watch it today, with a sense of perverse irony (as if children even have the capacity for irony, toddlers wearing snarky tees purchased by their Park Slope parents notwithstanding.) Sincerely, we foundTouched pretty entertaining, deeply soothing, and, in a strange way, taboo. That Monica had to solve problems meant that there were problems to be solved: adult problems like Crime! Sex! Lies! Even—following the introduction of the (very cute) Angel of Death in the third season—Death! Touched brought together our desire to experience the adult world with themes simple enough for us to understand. Not only were the themes, like Follow the Golden Rule, familiar to us already, but additionally at least one of the characters outright explained the story’s moral during the episode. A total failure in the world of “show-don’t-tell,” this tactic made the show less critically successful than, let’s say, Kieslowski’s Decalogue, but very accessible to a couple godless twerps sitting on a futon in Chicago.
While Mark’s Gospel praises one having the faith of a child, Christianity is more complicated than Touched By An Angel. Heck, even Touched By An Angel is more complicated than it presented itself to be. Besides troubling racial tropes I’ve noticed since watching the show as an adult—for instance, that Reese’s Tess, an overweight, sharp-tongued, black woman who cares for a younger white woman, easily fulfills a “Mammy” stereotype—Touched’s good-and-evil, black-and-white world often paints itself into an ideological corner. The show is at its weakest when, all having gone to Hell in the episode, the deus ex machina is literally God sending a fax to the angels informing them that He has fixed the problem. Even as a nine year old, I knew that was pretty bogus.
Still, I kept watching. I suppose I do not mind it when television patronizes to me; in fact, I was very into both Maury Povich and MTV’s reality show lineup throughout myTouched phase. But did the creators of Touched By An Angel intend for me to consume Monica’s dramas like I did Genesis and Elka’s on The Real World: Boston? While a quick Google search of the show’s head writer and executive producer, Martha Williamson, would suggest an explosive, Beliefnet.com’s “Most Powerful Christian in Hollywood 2007” worthy “No! Touched is different!,” it is hard to deny that Touched is unlike other, less mainstream Christian media I have encountered over the years. More than it fits the Christian genre, it is a CBS show: Less like VeggieTales; more like, as my sister recalled, “Law and Order with happy endings.”
Maybe one day—for sake of fairness—I will pick up one of Williamson’s books or tapes and give her another chance to catechize me. Through a more personal medium, like audio or the written word, maybe her brand of Christian spirituality would stick, somehow altering how I live my daily life. Until then, I will be on the phone with my sister, each of us telling the other, “God loves you,” over and over.
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