Television: Spirits of the Age

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Despite Medium's quick success, there are a few catches to doing spooky on TV. Compared with movies, a continuing series has limits both on special effects and plot options. As Noxon puts it, "You have a lot of characters who you can't kill off." And there's a fine line between the supernatural and religion, a subject that truly horrifies controversy-averse programmers.

Medium's spirituality is inoffensively generic--the standard apparitions caught between our world and an undefined "other side." (Likewise, CBS's Joan offers a smiling, nondenominational God.) NBC will take a more boldly religious tack later this spring with Revelations (debuts April 13), a six-episode series investigating a sequence of events that suggests the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation is under way.

Written by David Seltzer (who also wrote the Ur-Apocalyptic flick The Omen), the show has some of the religious intrigue of The Da Vinci Code and some of the grim phantasmagoria of The Passion of the Christ--two successes NBC would clearly like to have rub off on it. "In the tumultuous times we live in," says NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly, who green-lighted both Medium and Revelations, "Apocalyptic theory and big existential questions tend to be on the rise."

Revelations, like Medium and The X-Files before it, uses a believer-skeptic pairing. Sister Josepha Montifiore (Natascha McElhone) belongs to an order of nuns, at odds with the Vatican, that believes the Second Coming is imminent; her reluctant partner, Dr. Richard Massey (Bill Pullman), is a secular academic. But the series leaves no room for doubt that otherworldly events are going on. In the pilot, there is a bona fide miracle (the shadow of Christ appears on a mountainside in Mexico), a Satanist cuts off his own finger without bleeding, and a baby--who may be the Antichrist or Christ reborn--impossibly survives a shipwreck. It's over-the-top stuff, but so is the Book of Revelation itself, and while the dialogue is campy and portentous ("All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days!"), it delivers a good old New Testament scare.

While NBC may want to reach religious conservatives who bought up Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of Armageddon books and saw The Passion in droves, Revelations could also offend some of them. Its heroes are seeking to forestall the Apocalypse--even though for some believers, the end of days, and the establishment of Christ's kingdom, is to be hoped for. (Revelations could become a regular series, in which case ending the world would hurt its syndication chances.)

Seltzer, however, says he wants to entertain people of all religious backgrounds, or none. "I consider the Bible one of the great mystery thrillers of all time," he says. And, he adds, the story has topical appeal: "If you look at [the Book of] Revelation and what it says about the end of days"--war, famine, plague--"the world it describes looks like the world around us."