Divine Programming

From the mid-90s to the present, television drama with religious content has come to reflect the growing cultural divide between white middle-America and concentrated urban elites. As author Charlotte E. Howell argues in this book, by 2016, television narratives of white Christianity had become entirely disconnected from the religion they were meant to represent. Programming labeled 'family-friendly' became a euphemism for white, middlebrow America, and developingaudience niches became increasingly significant to serial dramatic television. Utilizing original case studies and interviews, Divine Programming investigates the development, writing, producing, marketing, and positioning of key series including 7th Heaven, Friday Night Lights, Rectify, Supernatural,Jane the Virgin, Daredevil, and Preacher. As this book shows, there has historically been a deep ambivalence among television production cultures regarding religion and Christianity more specifically. It illustrates how middle-American television audiences lost significance within the Hollywood television industry and how this in turn has informed and continues to inform television programming on a larger scale. In recent years, upscale audience niches have aligned with the perceived tastes of affluent, educated, multicultural,and-importantly-secular elites. As a result, the televised representation of white Christianity had to be othered, and shifted into the unreality of fantastic genres to appeal to niche audiences. To examine this effect, Howell looks at religious representation through four approaches - establishment,distancing, displacement, and use - and looks at series across a variety of genres and outlets in order to provied varied analyses of each theme.

...Howell's research and interviews help us see inside the minds of those who create the media, images, and narratives society engages with on a daily basis., Recommended., Howell's thematic and regional limitations are clear and coherent, and the book seems to invite further studies of religious traditions that fall outside of the white, Protestant Christian norms that pervade American television...Divine Programming has, thankfully, cracked the surface of such a fruitful field of study., Divine Programming takes the innovative approach of combining industry studies methods with textual analysis of a wide range of TV shows to create an insightful step forward in the relatively understudied area of religion on dramatic TV. Charlotte Howell's carefully analyzed interviews with producers and industry execs offer critical new insight into how Hollywood imagines religion, especially Christianity, on mainstream TV during a period of intense and rapid change for the industry., Divine Programming is indispensable reading for anyone interested in religion on television. This insightful study of how industry norms and cultural attitudes shape how a central part of American life is depicted, or obscured, on screen is a boon to anyone interested in television, American culture or the role of the industry in shaping how our world is seen on TV.

Charlotte E. Howell is Assistant Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University. Her work has been published in the Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Television, Networking Knowledge, Kinephanos, and in the anthology Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back.