Reviewed by Matt Murphy

A scant four years ago "Touched by an Angel" flapped its wings, shuffled off the network coil and moved on to TV afterlife—i.e. syndication. Last season, an executive at TNT decided that TV needed another show about redemption and angels. Only this time, they wanted to throw in more cussing, sex, and booze. Oh, and they also wanted it to be a police procedural.

The result is "Saving Grace," and season one was recently released on DVD. Academy Award winner Holly Hunter plays Grace Hanadarko—a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, adulterating atheist who is clearly a very bad person. She’s also a police detective in the ambiguously titled Major Crimes Unit in Oklahoma City. One night during she leaves a bar completely smashed and runs over a man. When she realizes what she’s done she instinctively asks God for help—which arrives in the form of a last chance angel named Earl (played by "Deadwood’s" Leon Rippy). Earl becomes a combination of mentor, therapist, and pain in the ass to Grace, dispensing Sunday school lessons like “don’t lie” and “stop sleeping around” in an effort to save her from damnation.

This show has a staggering amount of problems. First off it makes "CSI" look like a documentary on police procedure. Detectives frequently run around without gloves, trample all over crime scenes, don’t bother with warrants, and never read Miranda Rights. True, sometimes this is motivated by Grace's rebellious nature, but more often than not it's due to lazy writing. The cases themselves are formulaic done-in-ones. At best they are a distraction from the Earl/Grace stories with their “and then this happened” turns. At worst, they are forehead slappingly painful with bland or just plain obnoxious secondary characters. Not even a guest appearance from James Marsters managed to spice up one of these things.

The entire series is rife with melodrama from the disjointed plotting to the cast's hammy acting. Characters are quick to anger and even quicker to reconcile, and not because of character development but because it's just easier for everything to be back to the way it was at the end of each episode. And Laura San Giacomo's character, a forensic technician and Grace's lifelong friend, routinely makes circular arguments about God and angels in an attempt to ascribe more gravitas to the plot.

Oh, and there’s quasi-symbolic dreams that count as major plot points. Spoiler alert: God is a dog with a huge tongue. Not even joking.

Another favorite part of mine is Grace’s inevitable “why does God allow evil” tantrum. Hunter actually shakes her fists to the sky and shouts “I hate you God”

while asking why bad things still happen in the world. I suppose this pales in comparison to Kenny Johnson’s character (Grace’s partner and fuck buddy), who only has three faces: the “I’m confused” pout, the “I’m about to punch” sneer, and the “I’m having sex right now” grimace.

While I don’t think the basic premise is terrible, there is a fundamental problem with the show’s one-sided presentation. There’s the fact that Earl only really pushes a Christian path toward salvation—and a strictly Catholic one at that. Oh sure, he name-checks Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism as alternative means of getting back in God’s good books, but it’s clear the writers have no knowledge of them (especially since Buddhism is really less of a religion and more of a philosophy) since they're never considered viable options. Case in point: the show’s one Muslim character, a death row convert. He's more like a novelty than a storyline. Instead of, say, exploring different concepts of God, the discussion is kept skin-deep while the dialogue dances around anything that might actually be provocative.

Even the bonus features are sub-par. The interactive menus feature wallpaper that even my great aunt would say is ugly, and the five “featurettes” are actually just promos that ran on TNT. They recycle the same four clips from the show and the same sound bytes from cast interviews in every one. And these aren’t the good kind of cast interviews; they’re the “this show is such a joy to work on” cast interviews. I must admit, though, that the “Season One Rapid Recap” is pretty funny, giving you a greatest hits of the show's most groan-inducing moments.

I suppose I should give props to creator Nancy Miller for giving the show the original setting of Oklahoma City, even if it looks remarkably like sunny Burbank, CA. It's not enough to make the show interesting, but at least it's not New York, Las Vegas or Los Angeles.

There’s a contingent of people—most likely leftover from the “Touched by an Angel” crowd—who will find this show compelling because they feel they’re better off spiritually than the protagonist. This show was tailor made for them. If you're looking for something with depth, though, ignore this show.