TV Directors: Doing everything Movie Directors do, only faster (sometimes).

The next time you watch Lost, try setting aside the theories of good and evil, the intricacies of electromagnetic fields, the crush you have on Josh Holloway. Focus, instead, on the camera angles.

Consider, for instance, the airplane sequence in this season's premiere, "LA X." It re-created scenes from the 2004 pilot, but with differences small and large: a guy gets one bottle of vodka instead of two; someone's on the plane who wasn't there before; and oh, yes, there's no crash. It was the viewers' first glimpse of an alternate reality, and it was intended to be unsettling and surreal. That's why, for certain shots, director Jack Bender put his camera on a rocker plate, allowing it to tilt and swoop eerily around a character's head. "I just wanted something to be a little off," he told me.

Casual viewers might not have even been conscious of that movement, but Bender knew it would affect the mood in the way he wanted. It's the kind of technical choice that a good director makes, and it's the reason why, in the movie world at least, directors get power, glory, and ample credit for their creativity.

In television, however, directors work in relative obscurity. They're listed at the end of the opening credits but rarely become household names. TV is known as a writer's medium, driven by the people who devise plotlines and character arcs. The auteurs are the show creators and the show runners, who oversee all aspects of production. The Sopranos was considered David Chase's show; Boston Legal was David E. Kelley's; Grey's Anatomy belongs to Shonda Rhimes.

But on ambitious TV shows—an ever growing category—directors are far more than just baby sitters who tell the actors where to stand. Directors help to establish a visual language for individual episodes and for series as a whole. They're responsible for choosing camera positions and drawing out performances from actors. Bender describes his role as cooking a meal from a recipe the writers have provided.

Rod Holcomb is among the career directors who have worked on a broad range of shows, shifting continuously between genres and styles. After starting his career in the ABC mailroom—really!—he worked his way up to a producing position on The Six Million Dollar Man, then started directing episodes of Battlestar Galactica, B.J. and the Bear, and Hill Street Blues. He later became one of a subset of TV directors who specialize in pilots; his include the first episodes of The Greatest American Hero, China Beach, and ER. For the ER pilot in 1994, Holcomb devised the show's trademark verite style. Action scenes were designed to convey a feeling of organized chaos—the camera was constantly moving, and the actors had to work to stay in its view. It was an idea he drew from visits to real emergency rooms, where long stretches of boredom were punctuated by sudden bursts of manic activity.

Pilots establish the look and feel of a series, but early episodes continue that work, and there, too, directors can have a major influence. Bender didn't direct the Lost pilot—that was J.J. Abrams—but he helmed the second episode, "Walkabout," and set some ground rules that have largely endured. Handheld cameras shouldn't be used unless they serve a real dramatic purpose. ("I said, 'OK, let's not become the handheld show,'" Bender says.) Blues and greens, the main colors on the island, should largely be kept out of the flashback scenes. During the filming of "Walkabout," Bender also made subtle changes to the script in order to heighten the drama. One scene, set on the beach amid the ruins of a crashed airplane, called for a knife to fly through the air and land in the trunk of a tree. Bender decided to send the knife into a seat cushion lodged in the sand, while a character sat in the adjacent seat.

Bender is also an executive producer of Lost, overseeing the filming operation in Hawaii (which includes managing the series' other directors) while the writers and show runners toil in Burbank. Show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse leave many of the day-to-day decisions about props and sets to Bender and count on him to maintain a consistent vision and tone. "The ultimate goal—and this is more Jack's responsibility than it is ours—is that when you're watching an episode of Lost, you're immersed in the experience of watching it,'' Lindelof says.

But even directors who swoop in to helm a single episode often have power to block scenes and modify scripts. They just have to learn to navigate different show runners' styles. Aaron Sorkin, creator and writer of The West Wing, barely writes stage directions at all, says Lesli Linka Glatter, another longtime TV director. He'll produce pages of dense dialogue and leave directors to sort out the motion. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, by contrast, writes scripts filled with physical descriptions, specifying when Don Draper picks up a glass of Scotch and when he takes a sip.

But Glatter says she's learned that Weiner is open to suggestions, too. She can tell him, "Matt, I understand that Don Draper is taking an emotional beat there. Can he look out the window versus taking a sip of Scotch?" The answer tends to be yes. "He just needs to know you know what the subtext is," Glatter says. "And once you do, he gives you a lot of freedom."

On a series like Mad Men, that freedom translates into the ability to direct what is essentially a small independent film, choosing shots that set a tone and send a message. In the Season 3 episode "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency"— for which she won a Directors Guild of America award—Glatter made the decision to film a charged scene between Don and Joan Holloway as a "two-shot," without cutaways or close-ups. She also storyboarded the grotesque-yet-hilarious sequence when a runaway lawnmower crosses the Sterling Cooper offices and runs over the foot of a British executive. For the pivotal moment when blood spatters onto three Sterling Cooper employees, Glatter pulled a trick to ensure that the actors would look genuinely shocked. She told them fake blood would be thrown on them on the count of three. Then, when the camera was running, she had it thrown on "two."

It was jolting, but also just right—as Glatter notes, the entire episode "was about expectation and uncertainty." A director's job, she says, is to establish that kind of overarching theme and to do so at the breakneck pace of television production. Compared with film directors, TV directors work through a lot more material, a lot more quickly. On many shows, directors have a scant eight days to prepare for an hour-long episode and eight more to shoot it; two-hour feature films are often produced over the course of months.

"You need to know what the $5 scene is and what the $1 scene is," Glatter says. "You have to know … the scene that turns your story and what you want to spend your time on."

Sometimes it's the small scenes that benefit most from a director's touch. Holcomb has directed his share of boffo action sequences, but he also talks with pride about a segment in a recent episode of The Good Wife, the CBS legal procedural starring Julianna Margulies as a politician's wife who returns to the work force after her husband gets caught in a scandal. The scene features Margulies and Josh Charles, who plays a law school friend—and possibly an old flame—who is now her boss. They're discussing her role at the firm, but there's ample subtext: jealousy, mistrust, and unrequited love.

"I want to be here," she says.
"I want you to be here," he replies.
"Then … then I'm here," she says.
"OK," he says.

The dialogue is spare but the scene takes up a lot of time. Holcomb says his chief contribution was to insist that the actors not rush it: "I just simply said, 'Too fast. Too fast. Slower.' " When the camera lingers on their faces—the slight smile on Margulies' lips, the wistful look in Charles' eyes—it's clear that the director knew what he was doing. - Joanna Weiss

What Will The Post-Lost, Post-Heroes Era Look Like?

Two genre TV shows really broke out of the pack and captured the popular imagination in the past half-decade: Lost and Heroes. They both showed how genre TV can rule the DVR era. What's going to happen when they're gone?

We still don't know, of course, if we've seen the last of Heroes. It could come back, either in the fall or in January, but if it does, it'll likely be some kind of "final chapter" miniseries, wrapping the show up. Whether we get to see Sylar channeling Daniel Day Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being one more time, though, it feels like the era of Lost and Heroes is coming to an end with this TV season.
It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when Heroes was up there with Lost, and both shows were among the dozen or so most discussed series on television. Heroes' first season was a phenomenon, for similar reasons to Lost's success — a sprawling family drama, dark mysteries and unpredictable characters (like HRG and Clyde).

Both shows managed to thrive, in the era of TiVo, by being watercooler viewing. If you missed the newest episode of Lost or Heroes, you'd have to listen to your coworkers talking about it the next day. The challenge of DVR viewing is especially huge for shows that capture a large nerd audience, probably because nerds are early adopters. I always think it's funny when TV execs tout the large numbers of people who watch their shows via DVR after the fact — sure, it adds to the overall number of viewers. But when genre shows have large numbers of late DVR viewers, that's not good news. It means those shows aren't addictive enough to be same-night viewing.

(And also, of course, the "watercooler" thing is probably way less effective for shows that air on Friday nights, in which case you have until Monday to watch them, even assuming your coworkers are going to talk about them anyway.)

In the past half dozen years, a lot of other shows have had strong opening weeks — followed by sharp drop-offs. I've argued before that science fiction movies and TV shows show the same pattern, in fact. A blockbuster opening weekend, fueled by buzz and spectacle, and then catastrophic drops in successive weeks. SF shows with record-breaking huge pilot ratings have included Bionic Woman, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, FlashForward and V. Pilot episodes tend to be mini-movies, too, directed by actual film directors or hired-gun pilot directors, and featuring huge special effects budgets. It's always a bit of a letdown when a show settles into its normal pattern of smaller-scale adventures, after a huge blockbuster pilot.

By contrast, Heroes started off with 14 million viewers, and then actually built up to 16 million viewers over the course of the fall. By the time its first season finale aired, it had softened slightly, but still managed to score close to 14 million viewers. Season two bowed to nearly 17 million viewers and managed to hold on to 11 million of them.

And Lost launched with nearly 19 million viewers, garnering 23.5 million viewers for its second season premiere. As recently as season four, it was garnering 17 million viewers, and the final season premiere won an impressive 14 million viewers.

With both these shows gone, there'll be no model on television for how a science-fiction show can gain a mass audience and sustain it over weeks and years.

So how did Lost and Heroes buck the trend and convince those 17 million Americans they were must-watch TV? A few things suggest themselves: They're both shows about ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. They don't try to adapt the "police procedural/CSI" model to science fiction — as so many other shows have tried to do. The characters aren't experts, and in fact they usually know less than the audience does. (I think this might be key for the "water cooler" factor, actually.)

Instead, both shows are what you might call "paranormal soap operas." (I'm using the word "paranormal" loosely here.) As I mentioned above, there are sprawling family sagas in both shows — in fact, they both feature a blonde illegitimate daughter who unknowingly meets her bio-dad's family. There are also mysteries within mysteries — remember when we were dead curious about the shadowy "Linderman" on Heroes, before we found out it was just Malcolm McDowell being campy? — and characters whose allegiances were unclear.

The tone and composition of the shows varied a lot — Lost was a good deal darker and more literary than Heroes turned out to be, and tough guys like Jack, Sawyer and Locke turned out to be a lot more watchable than the mom-obsessed Petrelli boys. But it does seem significant that the two most successful SF shows of the past six years follow a soap-opera model. You can see why, with the success of shows like CSI, the idea of a CSI-X-Files hybrid might have felt like a no-brainer. But in practice, it seems like TV audiences only want to watch experts at work in a few very specific contexts, like hospitals and crime labs.

So what will the post-Lost/Heroes era look like? We posted a list of 18 upcoming shows that could be the next big thing, but many people seem to think it'll be a bit of a wasteland. In any case, the end of Lost, in particular, will leave a huge vacuum. At some point, the wheel will turn again and one of the "big four" broadcast networks will be willing to take a chance on another potential juggernaut.

What will the next Lost or Heroes look like? It's always hard to predict these things, of course. But there are a few possibilities:

1) Another sticky soap opera about ordinary people to whom weird shit happens. I'm racking my brains — has anybody actually launched a show that meets this description since Lost and Heroes? I guess FlashForward tried to do that — but the soap-opera elements have felt like weak tea, and "FBI agents investigating weird shit" isn't really the same as "ordinary people who get swept up in weird shit."

2) A show about a single ordinary person who gets swept into an extraordinary world could also work. But I feel like Bionic Woman met that description, and the new Jaime Sommers wound up just feeling like a tool of the mysterious organization, and she also stopped feeling like an ordinary person pretty quickly. I would imagine that's a peril of the "single ordinary person in an extraordinary world" format.

3) Something that capitalizes on the success of the other geek-oriented show to build an audience in recent years: The Big Bang Theory. From around 8 million viewers in its first season and 10 million in its second, the nerd-comedy show has been getting up to 16 million viewers lately. If someone finds a way to do a version of Big Bang that includes more overtly science-fictional elements mixed in with the nerd humor, it could be equally huge.

There's one thing that won't give us the next mega-hit, I feel confident in saying: A show about FBI agents investigating stuff. If a duo of FBI agents were going to be the next Jack Shephard and John Locke, then it would have happened by now. And if the "CSI-meets-X-Files" thing was going to bear fruit, then Fringe, a truly excellent show, would be getting 15 million viewers a week.
But it's entirely likely the next huge genre mega-success on television will be just as unexpected and hard to predict as Lost and Heroes both were. Let's hope it's as great as both shows were in their heyday. - Charlie Jane Anders

TV TIME: Cable vs. Network Budgets - Alan Sepinwall's mailbag.

Critic Alan Sepinwall had a great piece in The Star Ledger about Television budgets. Its posted below.

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Letters, I get letters, and in the latest mailbag, I have questions about the relative cost of network vs. cable dramas, ABC's short-lived summer soap "Defying Gravity," a creative rebound for "Grey's Anatomy" and more.

On the cheap

Dear Alan: What is the cost difference between network shows and cable shows? It seems to me USA keeps pumping out hits lately. I know the ratings aren't great when compared with popular prime-time network shows, but if these shows are considered hits in their smaller viewing blocks, what if they got moved to a more friendly time and place?

Basically, is the cost such a difference where "Monk" can last eight seasons and be considered a huge success and shows like "Southland" make 10 episodes and are done?

— Danny Applegate

Alan says: I asked the producer on a scripted drama on a successful basic cable network, and who has experience in network TV. He said, "Our budget is $1.6 (million) to $1.8 (million) per episode. And we shoot in seven days. A network show shoots at least eight days and typically has a budget of close to $3 million. So it is very significant. You have to do more with less."

And because the shows cost so much less, the threshold for success is much lower on cable vs. network. (Cable networks also benefit from a dual revenue stream, where they get money from both advertisers and from cable companies, whereas the broadcast nets get only the ad dollars.)

Would some basic cable hits get bigger numbers on a broadcast platform? Almost certainly, in the same way that a Big Four network show's ratings go down if it moves to a smaller network or cable. But cable channels don't like to give up valuable assets, even to broadcast corporate siblings, so we tend to see these shows on a network only when they're in reruns.

And speaking of "Southland," though NBC canceled it without airing a single episode of season two, TNT has picked up the cop drama. It'll start showing the seven episodes of season one on Jan. 12, followed by the six episodes of season two that were produced before NBC pulled the plug. If the ratings are good, there's always a chance TNT could order more — with the caveat, of course, that the budget would almost certainly be much lower.

Astronauts in love

Dear Alan: I know "Defying Gravity" was pretty much an epic flop in the ratings, but the last episode ABC aired months ago left a major cliffhanger. From what I've read, there are five additional episodes that ABC did not air, but were recorded and broadcast in Canada. Any hope, for the space nerds like me, that ABC will air these in "burn-off theater"? If not, is there any place one can watch them online, or are there any plans to release a DVD set with all episodes?

— Matt Fowler

Alan says: There's been talk for a while that the remaining episodes of the summer drama might turn up online at Hulu or iTunes, but that hasn't happened yet. A DVD set of the entire first season is scheduled to come out on Jan. 19.

Good medicine

Dear Alan: Just an FYI: "Grey's Anatomy" was absolutely terrific last (week), if you get a chance to watch it. That's two in a row! It probably won't come back in the regular rotation of reviews for you, but it might be worth mentioning.

— Erin Payton

Alan says: An interesting thing has happened with "Grey's" lately. While Ellen Pompeo has been on quasi-maternity leave (limiting Meredith to scenes where she's in bed), and while Katherine Heigl has been off filming a movie (while Izzie got fired from the hospital and left her husband), "Grey's" has focused less on romantic angst and wacky comedy and more on straight-up medical drama. And while the sex and humor were what distinguished "Grey's" from other hospital shows, they've always been the most creatively volatile parts of the show, where the more traditional medical stories rarely falter.

Hopefully Shonda Rhimes and company are looking at what worked so well in the previous few weeks and keep that in mind once Pompeo and Heigl return to full duty.

Leno at 10: Yay?

Dear Alan: I love (NBC scheduling Jay Leno at 10 p.m. five nights a week): Now, I can DVR both "Law & Order"s at the new earlier times and watch them at 10 without the commercials. It is kind of like a retail store cutting square footage. Sales are bound to drop; the next step is to go out of business. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, the ultimate downside is that I will have no "L&O"s to watch when NBC TV folds its tent!

— Harry Murphy, Montclair

Alan says: And this is another reason NBC argued for "The Jay Leno Show." The ratings for many 10 p.m. shows have suffered the last couple of years because many viewers now use that hour the way you do: to watch shows DVR'ed earlier in the evening.

(Speaking of Leno and DVRs, NBC boasted that Jay's show would be "DVR-proof," in that no one would want to watch it a day or two later, and would therefore have to watch it live, with commercials. But recent Nielsen data about DVR usage is suggesting that being DVR-proof is not a good thing. Where other shows get an audience boost from DVR viewership — and where the data, surprisingly, shows that many people who watch shows on DVR are actually watching the commercials — Jay gets no boost.)

Sepinwall on why Jim and Pam's wedding is good for TV Comedy

Today's Star-Ledger column, about the current season of "Fringe," is one I'd kind of like a mulligan on, which is why I haven't posted it on-line. It's not that it's bad. It's that I was up against a tight deadline, scrapping for something I could write about quickly, that I resorted to a trick I've used on occasion: assembling bits and pieces of various blog entries about the show into a "new" column. It's fine for the print-only readers, but in this case I wish I hadn't done it, because there was a more obvious topic - albeit one where I would also be recycling thoughts previously expressed early and often online.

In retrospect, I really wish I had written about how happy I am that Jim and Pam's wedding is happening tonight on "The Office," and what I hope that wedding will do for other TV shows, but fear it won't. Fortunately, the blog has more flexible time and space restrictions, so I can write that now.

There has been a school of thought in TV for a few decades now that any show built around Unresolved Sexual Tension (UST for brevity's sake in the rest of this post) will be ruined the second the UST gets resolved and the couple gets together.

This school of thought is misguided at best, idiotic and self-destructive at worst.

The theory is based on the idea that "Moonlighting" died as soon as David and Maddie got together, but as I've pointed out in the past, and as Linda Holmes did a good job of summarizing recently, that's completely incorrect. By the time David and Maddie got together for real, "Moonlighting" was already dead. If anything, I'd argue the show might have kept some of the viewers who wound up fleeing if they had just given everybody a David/Maddie relationship earlier, since the comic dynamic between the two characters would have been about the same.

And before there was "Moonlighting," there was "Cheers," which put together its own UST couple, Sam and Diane, by the end of its first season with no one objecting. Now, "Cheers" would spend the next four seasons frequently breaking those two up and putting them back together, but the writers never artificially tried to delay a hook-up because they felt the audience wasn't ready for it yet.

But because of The "Moonlighting" Fallacy, far too many TV writers and executives have come to believe that resolution=doom. "NewsRadio" creator Paul Simms more or less destroyed his relationship with NBC by having Dave and Lisa sleep together in the show's second episode - they wanted him to tease it out forever, so they'd have an angle to promote - even though he wound up getting several seasons of material out of their affair.

"Ed" was a show more or less destroyed by its belief in The Moonlighting Fallacy. Its creators were so terrified of having Ed and Carol Vessey hook up long-term that they kept throwing one increasingly stupid obstacle after another in front of them. That show betrayed two separate misunderstandings of "Moonlighting." Beyond the obvious one, it ignored the fact that Dave and Maddie, like Sam and Diane, were interesting as a UST couple because they were so seemingly incompatible, yet had an irresistible attraction for each other. Chemistry aside, they made each other miserable and probably shouldn't have been together (and Sam and Diane ultimately weren't), so the constant delaying made sense on some level, even if the show dragged it out too long. Ed and Carol, on the other hand, were two perfectly nice people who got along well and had common interests and temperaments. There were no sparks when they fought, and no logical reason for them to not be together once they were both unattached, and the increasingly-contrived reasons to keep them apart made that show's middle seasons more or less unwatchable. In the final season, they were together, and the show just treated their relationship as a fact of life while telling other, more amusing stories, but by then too many viewers had left out of impatience.

Which brings me to Jim and Pam. Because it took "The Office" writers a while to figure out how to write for their main character, Jim's yearning for Pam quickly became the show's ongoing hook, and the subject of many an NBC promo. (NBC loves to promote its comedies as if they were soap operas.) And based on previous experience, I feared Greg Daniels and company were going to drag out their inevitable coupling beyond all good reason.

And though it took until the end of the third season (really, the end of the second, since season one was only six episodes) for them to get together as a for-real couple, the waiting period never felt forced. Pam was in a relationship with Roy (inspired by the Dawn/Lee relationship from the British show), and then when by the time she wasn't, Jim was plausibly so hurt by her rejection that he moved to Connecticut, and into a relationship with Karen, and the writers mined some good comic and dramatic tension from Pam and Karen having to work together. It felt real, and it felt right.

More importantly, in the two-plus seasons since Jim and Pam started dating, then got engaged, then began preparing for a baby, "The Office" has not been ruined. Jim and Pam didn't stop being funny, or interesting, just because they were together and happy, nor did they begin to dominate the show. There was good material about their (understandable) desire to keep things a secret from their co-workers, and we've seen the staff either resent or make jokes about their relationship, and we've even seen on occasion Pam and Jim competing with each other in spite of their one true love.

And that's why I'm not worried that they'll suddenly become boring after they're married, or after the baby comes. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship knows there are plenty of things about it to make fun of, and plenty that's dramatic. Keeping two meant-to-be characters apart for a long time isn't just misguided, it's lazy. It's born of the belief that anticipation is always more interesting than fulfillment, or that getting together is the destination, rather than a continuing part of the journey.

So I'll be very happy to watch the wedding episode tonight, not just because I've become attached to these two kooky, fictional kids, but because I hope some writers of future TV series are watching, and taking notes, and thinking, "Hey, maybe I don't need to keep my two main characters separate forever and ever and ever." - Alan Sepinwall

God Is Our Space Pilot: Does every Sci-Fi show need Jesus now?

(warning, spoilers ahead for many scifi shows)

Science fiction TV shows used to be about scientists playing God — now our intrepid heroes meet God, instead. The overt religious discussions on Battlestar Galactica stood out as unusual, but now every SF show brandishes a bible. What happened?

Oh, and there are some spoilers for upcoming TV shows here.

We can't help noticing the odd religious moments in a lot of the fall's biggest SF TV shows, and how shoehorned-in the references to God or the Bible often seem to be. Unlike Firefly, which featured a man of God as one of its major supporting characters and naturally sparked theological discussions, or BSG, which took place during an apocalypse, the newest crop of shows seems determined to mention God even when it doesn't make that much sense.

Take the scene above from the season opener of Fringe, where FBI agent Amy Jessup goes through all of the Fringe Division's cases and compares them with Bible verses — it's all in the Book Of Revelation! (Thanks to Meredith for suggesting this one.)

Or FlashForward, whose pilot includes one character who randomly questions whether God gave everyone on Earth a glimpse of the future as a punishment. Leaving aside the fact that clairvoyance seems like an odd shape for divine punishment to take. There's also the fact that the slutty/Christian babysitter just happens to be making out with her boyfriend (while the girl she's looking after is asleep) and thus feels guilty — so she decides that God gave the entire world a future vision just to punish her for making whoopie on the couch. Make sense? Absolutely not. Unless you think that some studio exec in a meeting said, "We need a religious angle here. There oughta be one character who decides that this was all God's doing. Because that'll play well in the God states."

And then there's V, which — spoiler alert — has aliens visiting us and claiming to be benefactors, who've come to help us. Plenty of people are suspicious of these allegedly enlightened visitors, but then we meet a Catholic priest who's decided to preach that these aliens are "God's creatures," with the implication being that they're sent by God. And the priest tells his underling, Father Jack, that he must preach the aliens are divinely sanctioned — or else. It's even sort of implied (if I remember correctly) that the Vatican has made support for the aliens official policy. WTF? Why would the Catholic church come out in support of random aliens that we know nothing about? It's one of the few moments in the V pilot that literally makes no sense whatsoever, and it inspired much head-scratching when we saw it at Comic Con.

And then there's Stargate Universe, which — spoiler alert again! — has a character experience weird religious visions for no discernable reason in its second episode. (Or third, if you count the two-hour pilot as two episodes.) It's never entirely clear why one character, stuck on a weird, inhospitable planet, is having visions of being in church and talking to a priest, and it seems partly designed to give us a chunk of this character's backstory. But it also feels like a quick-and-dirty way of conveying that this character is having a spiritual wandering-in-the-wilderness thing, without actually having to create any real religious/spiritual content to go with it. It feels a bit cheap: he's in the wilderness, and he sees some churchy stuff. Oh! So that means it's deeply symbolic or something.

And of course, Dollhouse gave us the ultra-stereotypical "Christian cult with guns" in one of its first-season episodes — the one where Echo gets turned into a blind religious zealot with cameras in her eyes, and everybody's sorta Amish and sorta Mormon.

Honestly at times, watching current SF TV it's hard not to feel like someone watched too many early John Woo movies and thought "church with birds in it — deep!" Or maybe too many early 1980s New Wave videos, where Duran Duran dance around pews and it randomly turns black and white. (And yes, I know that those videos are directed by Highlander auteur Russell Mulcahy.) But it also feels like a bit of pandering to a Christian nation that's perceived as being a bit suspicious of science-y stuff.

The Genesis of religion in SF TV

Once, it seemed like religious iconography and rhetoric was rare in science fiction — the original Star Trek confronted Captain Kirk and his crew with Greek gods, as well as godlike aliens who just wanted to toy with our heroes. You might have a hysterical crewman babble something about "If God had wanted us to go into space, etc," and the Roman episode did end with Uhura staring at the camera and saying the rebels were worshipping "the son of God." But these were just grace notes. (We won't get into Star Trek V, since that was a movie, and it came much later, and it makes the head hurt.)

After Trek, you certainly had the occasional SF program where the good guys were confronted with bog-standard space gods, who were notably free of any religious dogma that people on Earth could recognize. In fact, one reason why space gods are so often ridiculous and campy is the fact that they're trying so hard to be ecumenical. One common SF trope, over the decades, was the "meeting the real-life alien behind the ancient Earth myth — but this was usually the creature who inspired the Aztecs or the Egyptian religions, not the Judeo-Christian deal.

But in general, when television SF did grapple with religion prior to recent years, it was to reveal religious icons as aliens, using high technology to impress the superstitious. It wasn't until the final couple of seasons of Stargate SG-1 that this "superstitious humans worshipping aliens" storyline seemed to be an overt critique of organized religion. The show suddenly introduced a new antagonist for our heroes, a set of "ascended" (non-corporeal) aliens called the Ori, who encourage humans to worship them and preach from the Book of Origin. Writes blogger Chris Bateman in his 10-part essay on religion in science fiction:

It is almost impossible not to interpret the Ori as a paper-thin parody of Christianity... Much of the shallow critique of Christianity occurs between Claudia Black's ex-Goa'uld host Vala Mal Doran – who takes over Richard Dean Anderson's role as comic relief in the later seasons and fulfills this role magnificently – and her Ori-worshipping husband Tomin. Vala and Tomin square off in debate after Tomin reads incessantly to her from the Book of Origin, with Vala accusing him of taking a bunch of stories about how to live well and using it as a justification for war and murder. The scene serves a narrative purpose – Tomin later witnesses a Prior blatantly distorting the meaning of one of the verses in the Book of Origin, causing him to question his faith – but it also reads as a clumsy attack on contemporary Christianity.

Bateman theorizes that the producers of SG-1 were aghast at the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and wanted to satirize what they perceived as a right-wing Christian crusade against Islam. To some extent, The 4400 also seemed to be taking jabs at organized religion on occasion.

But before SG-1 introduced the Ori, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took a huge leap forward in introducing religious themes to SF, with the Prophets, aka the "wormhole aliens." For most of DS9's run, you could choose to believe the secular theory that the Prophets were merely interdimensonal aliens, who lived outside space/time and saw future and past as the same thing. But towards the end of the show's run, the messianic overtones around Benjamin Sisko made it harder and harder to sit on the fence. And meanwhile, Babylon 5 won praise for including characters of faith (including a Catholic commander, and a group of Catholic monks who come to live on the station) as well as including religion in many of its storylines.

Most recently, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles included Agent Ellison, who's frequently shown to be a Baptist, and religious references became more and more predominant in the show (which is about the actual apocalypse, so it does make sense to bring it up.) Most fans of BSG would agree that the show's monotheist/polytheist divide made it a much richer experience than a simple robots-vs-humans show would have been otherwise — regardless of how you may feel about the Baltar Cult, and the hand-wavy "Starbuck turns into ZZ Top" ending. And it's pure blasphemy to suggest that Firefly would be better without Shepherd Book.

The rise of Space Jesus?

Lately, though, it's seemed almost required to have some kind of religious discussion among a TV show's themes — and it's more likely to be Christian rather than some kind of vague Space Religion (TM) or misty spirituality.

Religion is part of society, and including religious points of view makes your world seem more realistic and three-dimensional — it would seem odd if science fiction on television never included a religious viewpoint, just as it would if people never mentioned politics at all. At the same time, there are ways to include religion that make sense (Firefly and T:SCC come to mind immediately) and ways to include it that feel gratuitous and weird (the Vatican is endorsing the aliens!)

And yes, when you throw in religion in a nonsensical way, it either feels like you're going for a cheap effect, or like you're pandering to religious people. Add to that the fact that scientists and people who use pure empiricism to deal with problems are far and few between — Walter Bishop and maybe the twisted Topher on Dollhouse are our only real avatars of tech nerdhood that I can think of off the top of my head. It's become a taboo in televised science fiction to show people doing science.

The show that's handling religion in the most fascinating manner right now is Supernatural, which is modern fantasy rather than science fiction. In the last year or so, angels have joined the show's long-standing demon characters — and now Lucifer himself is roaming around. And there are lots of hints that we'll actually be meeting God this season at some point. Theological discussions over why God allowed all of the horrors of the 20th century to happen are automatically more fascinating when they come out of the mouths of actual Angels, and the fact that the Archangels believe that God is dead makes for fascinating viewing.

So consider this a plea for more thoughtful portrayals of religion in science fiction — and fewer random, thoughtless, kitchen-sink inclusions. People who watch science fiction are smart. We can tell when we're being pandered to, and when we're being spoonfed religious ideas just because it makes your show seem more "mythic" or "relevant." Religion can make your science-fiction story feel like it takes place in a world we can relate to, and it can deepen your characters and add another layer to your story — or, in the wrong hands, it can feel like a random piece of baggage, tacked on to your story for spurious, external reasons. We can usually tell the difference between the two. - Charlie Jane Anders