Angst and Angels: 'Millennium' and 'Touched by an Angel' underscore the extremes of a culture's fears and hopes as 2000 draws near

The year 2000 is approaching on thundering hoofbeats, like those
of the four fabled horsemen. And as millennium draws near, Americans
are anxious.
Half of us believe in the second coming of Jesus, an event that
many Christians welcome with great joy but which for others has
become a foreboding of doom ever since Hal Lindsey wrote The Late
Great Planet Earth.
Meanwhile, 69 percent of Americans also say they believe in
angels. In today's popular culture, angels are emissaries of hope and
forgiveness, the opposites of millennial dread and judgment. Angels
are credited with saving lives, turning others around, or often
simply "being there" for us as postmodern therapists.
"As we drift towards Millennium, angels haunt us, on every
level," the scholar Harold Bloom observes in a new book, Omens of
Millennium.
And nowhere are these two realities more evident than on the
television dial.
On Sundays you can watch "Touched by an Angel" (7 p.m. on
Channel 5), a family program for the '90s about heavenly creatures
who pose as humans and help us out of our spiritual valleys. Then on
Fridays you can see its evil twin, "Millennium" (8 p.m. on Channel
4), a grim and gory thriller that turns everyday murder into a tale
of apocalyptic proportions.
Both shows trade in the same coin of social angst. They show
people driven by fear, trying to control the uncontrollable - and
thereby crossing over the divide between humans and God, sanity and
madness.
Heaven, American style
When "Touched by an Angel" was launched in 1994, it was during
a boom market for books about encounters with angelic beings.
Producer Martha Williamson was brought in to give the fad some
substance. She favored stories of personal redemption, much like
those dramatized testimonials featured on the "700 Club. " Word of
mouth did the rest, and "Touched," now in its third season, has
become the second highest-rated drama on television, after "ER."
The show revolves around two angels, Tess (played by Della
Reese), a seen-'em-all senior seraph; Monica (Roma Downey), her
spunky protege with the Irish lilt; and the humans they befriend in
the midst of life crises. What has surprised many TV executives and
critics, who seemed to be expecting another "Highway to Heaven," is
how frankly, even eagerly, "Touched by an Angel" explores death,
substance abuse and other social evils.
In one episode, a police officer is a secret junkie, and starts
stealing the drugs he finds on suspects; Monica becomes his rookie
partner and persuades him to come clean. In another, Monica must
convince a lovestruck young man that the old flame who's back in his
life doesn't really want his love, but is using him to fulfill her
own ambition.
Theodicy issues - dealing with the tough questions of how God can
allow evil to exist in the world - are a common theme on "Touched":
a pastor who suffers a lapse of faith over the death of a son, or a
surgeon repulsed by having to operate on the drunken driver that
killed his loved ones.
Actually, if the TV industry considers these stories
groundbreaking, it merely shows how out of touch it is with the rest
of the culture. They could've come straight out of a country-music
station or the pages of Guideposts magazine.
Williamson shares in the criticism of TV and its indifference to
the evils it puts out.
"If you look at the cultural effect of watching the news every
night, how people become inured to death, night after night - we turn
off. We lose our emotional reaction," she told The Kansas City Star
in a recent interview.
Williamson has made it clear she understood the meaning of the
millennium. "Americans are very discouraged about what's going on,"
she's been quoted elsewhere as saying.
And into that God-shaped vacuum is where her TV show goes.
"That's why 'Touched by an Angel' works," she said. "It bangs
at your heart. It wants to get in."
Last season the show introduced Andrew (John Dye), a utility
cherub and perhaps the first charismatic Angel of Death in history.
No situation is too downbeat for Tess, who is always at the ready
with a soothing, if unfocused, proverb ("When life keeps you in the
dark, baby, that's when you start looking at the stars! ").
Williamson, although reluctant to discuss her own spiritual
journey (as are co-stars Reese and Downey), promotes her show as well
as any modern-day evangelist. "We've had to slowly woo people," she
said. "First it was church people, who thought we'd done another
frothy fantasy like 'Bewitched. ' Then we had to woo families in
general with, 'You can trust us. We're not going to shock you next
week. ' Now it's time to build the trust of so-called fringe groups
that feel God is not for them."
The case can also be made that "Touched by an Angel" is more
about messengers than the messages they deliver. Just as repeated
exposure to the staging of cruelty - from the 6 o'clock news to
slasher flicks - undoubtedly adds to our millennial angst, so the
frequent contact with fictional angels somehow offers solace.
Williamson's supervising producer, Jon Andersen, had previously
worked on the TV series based on the "Friday the 13th" horror
movies. "He hadn't realized that working on those shows gets into
your blood," said Williamson. "You're spending day after day
creating evil for other people to look at. And it had an insidious
effect on him."
Touched by evil
There is almost nothing insidious about "Millennium," a dark
yet oddly compelling show from Chris Carter, who also created "The
X-Files."
Frank Black (played by the silver-throated Lance Henriksen) is a
former homicide detective specializing in serial killers. "Hey,"
says another cop, "you're the guy who caught the guy who ate his
victims. I was always curious - how'd he prepare them?"
"In the skillet," rumbles Frank in reply. "With potatoes. And
onions."
But Frank has a special "capability" that, in a way, is more
horrific a sight than any corpse: he has the power to re-envision the
crime, exactly as it happened, through the killer's demented eyes.
"I become the thing we fear the most," he says in the show's first
episode. "I become the horror. What I become, we can become only in
our heart of darkness. It's my gift. It's my curse. That's why I
retired."
Then one day, "I was approached by a group of men who helped me
understand my capability. " This ultra-secretive force, known as the
Millennium Group, enlists him in the pursuit of heinous crime. Their
origins are kept in the dark, much as the theology of God and angels
in "Touched" is deliberately vague. But, says Frank, "They believe
we can't just sit back and hope for a happy ending."
Of course, the notion that there is an "ending" at all plays
right into Americans' hopes and fears regarding death. And if that
doesn't scare you, there's always sheer terror.
Like a good sermon, every episode begins with a verse, usually
from Scripture. In one, based on Jeremiah 26:13 ("Amend your ways
and your doings and the Lord will change his mind about the
disaster he has pronounced against you"), a kidnapper begins
abducting teen-aged boys from a gated suburban community - every
parent's worst nightmare.
He sends messages to their fathers demanding they confess to sins
they have been covering up, lest the sins of the father be paid for
by the son. As they await their outcome, we see the victims fed the blood of previous victims, a gruesome and, so far as I could tell,
pointless scene.
"Millennium" is one of the most relentlessly brutal and
chilling programs to come down the pipe in a long time, even though
there's almost no on-screen violence. Carter, borrowing from
Hitchcock, shows only quick cutaways of the crime scenes that Frank
re-creates, thus giving an illusion of brutality far greater than
what is actually shown.
"You don't see the actual act so often," Carter said in an
interview last month in Los Angeles. "You see the results of it, and
its effects on people and how they get on with their lives. That's
the reason for doing this show."
In recent weeks there have been attempts to cast a little more
sunshine on Frank, by featuring his wife (Megan Gallagher) and child
(Brittany Tiplady) more prominently. The fundamental problem with
"Millennium," however, is not in its tone but its execution. This
show is ambitious with religious themes and it features some great
dialogue, but it's nearly incompetent at telling a story.
Take the episode in which a killer employs torture devices used
in the Spanish Inquisition to dispose of various clergymen. The
reason? His wife and child had died in a tragic fire, and these men
had apparently not explained to his satisfaction why bad things
happen to good people.
When the killer threatens to blow up a church with hostages
inside, Frank goes inside because, "I think I know what he wants."
(Uh-huh.)
"I've lost my faith! " wails the killer, a gun to Frank's head.
"No," says Frank. "You tried to kill your faith with the tools
of your own belief because of your pain. Because you think God's
forsaken you. You think you can get rid of your pain by slaughtering
the faith inside of you."
Interesting insight - but Frank forgets he's dealing with a nut
job here, and the only thing that keeps the guy from doing Frank in
is that shopworn TV device, the last-second sniper's bullet.
Unfortunately, Carter pulls out one of these chestnuts at the end of
just about every episode.
Actually, "Millennium" is not much more than a paranormal turn
on the standard detective mystery. Frank Black could well be the
agnostic update to Chesterton's Father Brown, who solved murders by
putting himself in the mind of the murderer. The difference is that
the kindly padre didn't need any creepy powers in order to do his
work: he simply believed in original sin and in Jesus' teaching that
all sin, whether monstrous or trivial, leads to death.
Yet is "Touched by an Angel" anything more than a gilded
serving of Chicken Soup for the Soul?
As Harold Bloom points out, angels used to get a whole lot more
accomplished during their visits to Earth. Gabriel revealed himself
to Joseph and Mary, and later the prophet Muhammad. Moroni chose
Joseph Smith. Angels once inspired humans to create world religions;
now they get us to enter self-help programs.
Monica the angel is fond of reminding us that humans have free
will, but doesn't that mean free will to turn down even the pleadings
of a beautiful Irish angel? Doesn't that mean free will to launch
chemical warfare, or racial genocide, or famines and plagues?
That is the evil that "Millennium" Americanizes, in the person
of the serial killer. Frank Black is the agnostic in each of us:
touched by evil, hanging on to what he knows is right, seeking
earnestly the elusive happy ending.