Streaming Religion

Netflix’s Daredevil (2015–2018) and Amazon’s Hand of God (2015–2017) illustrate how changing industry context, cultural conditions, audience engagement, and continued fragmenting into niche taste cultures coalesce to lead to greater diversity and increasing—if slowly—acknowledgment of religion’s use in prime-time dramas. These streaming dramas represent religion-as-religion within industrial practices that position even traditional religion as part of their edgy and quality claims. The assumed audience for these shows is still perceived as nonreligious, but after a dozen years of containing Christianity, these shows illustrate that edgy and upscale appeal is no longer imagined as wholly oppositional to white Christian representation.

Southern Realism

Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011) and Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016) exemplified containing Christianity’s middlebrow appeal through displacement onto the cultural specificity of a realistically portrayed American South within a quality television drama. These two shows represent Christianity as both the dominant faith of their characters and as a characteristic part of Southern culture. Creatives used the milieu of an “authentic” American South to shift religion away from themselves and their quality-audience expectations, maintaining acceptability within the dominant non-Christian culture of television production. This displacement safely contained religion within the creatives’ production culture, allowing them to acknowledge Christianity’s religious content, but only within the peculiar particularity of the American South.

Introduction

The introduction presents the broader context of both religion on television and the particular approach that this volume takes to its study: a production studies approach based in theories of television studies. Throughout, it establishes the significance of studying the discourses—utterances, practices, and ideologies—that shape how Christianity is represented on television and the production culture that creates that representation. The introduction also lays out the four-part structure of the book that details the four different approaches to positioning Christianity’s use in serial dramas over a twenty-year span: establishing white Christianity’s middlebrow associations, distancing through place and race, displacement through genre, and ultimately acknowledging and using as edgy content.

The Biblical Book of Revelation as Mythology

Eschatological dramas use the biblical Book of Revelation as their premise; however, despite the direct connection with the New Testament, the shows’ creatives disavow the religious nature of their narratives, reframing Christian elements as mythology. Supernatural (the WB/CW, 2005–2020), Dominion (Syfy, 2014–2015), and Constantine (NBC, 2014–2015) all use the Bible as the basis for what they assert is supernatural mythology. Such a strong disavowal of religion is especially necessary for creatives working on these three shows: they had a particularly strong fear of being associated with religious culture and audiences because their narratives are so closely tied to the Bible. The pushback against religion aligns with the assumption that the upscale fan audience these shows target is nonreligious.

Nonwhite Christian Dramas

This chapter examines the vastly different approach to religious representation for prime-time dramas focusing on casts and characters of color: Latinx Catholicism in Jane the Virgin (The CW, 2014–2019) and black megachurch evangelism in Greenleaf (OWN, 2016–). These portrayals of nonwhite Christianity use race as a distancing mechanism to articulate Christianity as a religion without the fear of (white) middlebrow taste associations. The assumed whiteness of upscale audiences allows for these shows to expand the possibilities of engaging with Christianity-qua-religion instead of Christianity as a primarily cultural narrative tool. As a result, Jane the Virgin and Greenleaf wrestle deeply with the characters’ faith as well as the larger institutions and systems surrounding Christianity.

Biblical Miniseries in the 2010s

Produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, The Bible (History, 2013), A.D.: The Bible Continues (NBC, 2015) and The Dovekeepers (CBS, 2015) operate as extensions of the Touched by an Angel approach to religious serial dramas. Ironically, success was achieved on a cable scale but not broadcast scale, despite the majority of Americans still identifying as Christian, indicating that the mass audience for dramas won’t be found in the Christian-tinged middlebrow appeal that helped shows like Touched by an Angel succeed in the 1990s. Thus, these overtly Christian series that are framed and marketed as Christian illustrate the decline in the value of that audience to the television industry in the current fractured market.

Conclusion

The shifts in representation and understanding of white Christianity on prime-time television from 1996 to 2016 can serve as an illustration of one domain that stoked the cultural resentment among many white, middle-class, Christian Americans who held relatively unchallenged cultural and television dominance until the 2000s. Christian representation largely stopped focusing on being faithful in prime-time dramas, and instead, religion became a narrative tool with little connection to lived religion. At the end of this period, this trend began to shift somewhat back toward situating Christianity as a lived—albeit edgy and flawed—religion and faith culture in television dramas because of the exponential growth of television content. The duality between middlebrow Christian associations and the drive for upscale appeal that has been negotiated over the twenty-year period of this book has continued and heightened in its polarization in such a way that Peak TV may herald increased divergence instead of continued negotiation.

Religion as Unreality

Within the production culture for fantastic series, religion is acknowledged but contained. The fantastic genre context allows for distancing content from traditional religious narratives and distancing characters’ beliefs from specific religious creed, labeling religion as spirituality. The quality fantastic shows Battlestar Galactica (SciFi, 2003–2009), Lost (ABC, 2004–2011), The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017) and Preacher (AMC, 2016–2019) do not represent religion as traditional religion within our familiar culture, but rather they present recognizably Christian elements in the functioning of belief systems with deep meaning for characters. But because of their quality framing and the genre containment, religious content in these fantastic series—albeit as abstracted spirituality—is acknowledged in their production cultures.

Christianity’s Broad Appeal in the 1990s

The formation of assumptions about Christianity’s associations with middlebrow taste on television is exemplified in discourses around Touched by an Angel (CBS, 1994–2003) and 7th Heaven (the WB/CW, 1996–2007). These shows employed overt moralizing, a religiously slanted lesson learned by both characters and viewers at the end of an episode, a lesson that in turn would resolve ongoing conflict or dramatic tension. Moreover, the shows’ creative and marketing discourses did not shy from the Christian aspects, assuming the mass audience was majority Christian and thus welcoming of or at least indifferent to Christian representation. These two shows exemplify the type of Christian representation that much of twenty-first-century dramas that followed used various containment strategies to distance themselves from in order to appeal to upscale viewers.