Television just isn’t what it used to be. TNT’s new series, Saving Grace, starring Holly Hunter, is clearly new television.
Hunter plays Grace Hanadarko, a rough-living Oklahoma City detective. In the premiere of the series, Grace drives herself home from drinking far too much and hits, and kills a man on a dark street. As she realizes CPR won’t bring him back, she utters a “God help me.”
Enter Earl, a tobacco-chewing, flannel-shirt clad, man who looks like he’d been living as hard as Grace had. Earl, however, is an angel. Earl meets Grace, takes her off to the desert for a conversation, then she awakes on her couch. The man she thinks she killed is alive – and on Death Row in Oklahoma. We’re not yet sure what really happened, but we are sure of this: Grace’s life is different.
Did I point out that in the opening scene Grace says cavalierly that she doesn’t believe in God?
Earl appears regularly to talk to Grace, wrestle with Grace, and volley questions with her. He doesn’t offer answers to clean up messes. Grace doesn’t gain the ability to fix things with the twitch of her nose.
I don’t know yet if I am sold on the concept of the series, but the insight into humans and God offered so far outweigh the theological shortcomings.
The thing I really like about Saving Grace is that all the talk about God that makes any sense at all is completely outside normal “churchy” language. Church-going Christians aren’t ridiculed and mocked as they are in so many series. There aren’t really many of them on the show – the characters who have so far confessed church attendance are as real as the rest.
Grace still isn’t sure she believes in God, but she is at least open to the idea. She doesn’t go immediately to a life on the straight and narrow, but she is now aware of more that is going on around her than she was before.
God is at work in Grace; and it is all happening in the process of her life. I am curious enough to want to find out just how God can get through to her. I can think of many different, unexpected, un “churchy” ways God has gotten through to me.
Sometimes even through television.
