Buffy The Vampire Slayer

If TV had its own list of 10 Creative Commandments, "Thou Shalt Not Discuss the Unknowable" would rank near the top.

In the 50-plus years since the medium became a force in American life, it has generally stayed away from overt depictions of God, faith and the concept of an afterlife, mainly for fear of alienating viewers and advertisers. Sure, shows like "The Waltons," "Highway to Heaven" and the recently defunct "Touched by an Angel" either assumed the existence of higher powers or, at the very least, showed regular folks treating prayer, God and church as givens. But there have been hundreds of other programs that dealt with these topics obliquely ("The Twilight Zone"), ignored them entirely (almost any) or drew on them only when they needed stock villains (where would detective shows be without cackling serial killers who claimed to be obeying the will of God?).

But a few years ago, the pop culture tide began subtly turning and audiences were confronted with movies and TV shows that addressed the Big Issues head-on, mixing suspense, bleak humor and commercial filmmaking skill.

First came a spate of horror movies with overt religious and philosophical undertones, including "The Sixth Sense" (1999), "Stir of Echoes" (2000) and "The Others" (2001). The first two revolved around living mortals who assisted the dead in finishing unfinished business; the third suggested that ghosts inhabit an alternate reality every bit as detailed, mundane and fraught with emotion as our own.

Then death came to TV too, in a fresh and brazen way. In 2001, HBO debuted "Six Feet Under," a drama about a family of undertakers that built every hour of every episode around death and fear of death and showed its screwed-up characters conversing with dead people.

That same year, the Sci-Fi Channel scored a cult success with "Crossing Over with John Edwards," in which the titular medium appeared before a studio audience and professed to communicate with audience members’ dearly departed loved ones. (Debunkers targeted Edwards as a trickster, but the charges didn’t hurt his popularity.)

This year, Showtime entered the fray with "Dead Like Me," a quirky comedy-drama about a sullen teenage girl (Ellen Muth) who’s killed by a chunk of falling space station, then drafted into service as a grim reaper entrusted with removing people’s souls prior to death.

The supernatural tide will swell throughout fall and spring, as networks and cable channels introduce even more series that deal, to some degree, with death, faith and the hereafter.

Fox has three shows that mix quirky setups and cosmic subject matter. One is "Tru Calling," featuring "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" co-star Eliza Dushku as a young coroner who receives messages from corpses, then awakens on the day before that person is fated to die and attempts to prevent the death from happening. (Think "The Sixth Sense" meets "Early Edition.")

Two more supernaturally-themed shows will air on Fox starting in January: "Still Life," a domestic drama narrated by a family’s recently deceased teenage son, and "Wonderfalls," about a young woman employed in a Niagara Falls gift shop who receives cryptic messages from trinkets and other inanimate objects that might offer divine insight into everyday life. (Yes, the concept plays as strangely as it reads.)

Meanwhile, CBS, the former home of "Touched by an Angel," is debuting "Joan of Arcadia," about a young woman who has regular conversations with God, who assumes the form of regular often unassuming citizens. (Mary Steenburgen and Joe Mantegna star as the girl’s parents; insert your own Mary and Joseph reference here.)

HBO’s new drama "Carnivale," about a low-rent carnival traversing the Dust Bowl during the Depression, seems on first glance to have little in common with the above series, but it deals with many of the same themes. Its main characters include a mysterious young nomad who might be a faith healer (Nick Stahl) and a preacher who exudes nobility but might be an agent of darkness (Clancy Brown). The series builds discussions of good, evil, faith and divine will into almost every scene, and it’s packed with overtly Biblical portents — including an episode in which the heroine (Clea DuVall) loses her virginity on the same day that an epic dust storm blows through the state.

Some of these current and upcoming shows are deadly serious; others are light, sardonic, even a tad kooky. But brush aside differences in style and tone, and you can recognize the same primal themes. To quote the death-obsessed Bob Fosse musical "All that Jazz’: "Death is in, man! Death is in!" So are God, faith, destiny and other unanswerables.

Bryan Fuller, the producer-writer of "Dead Like Me" and "Wonderfalls," says that if great numbers of TV executives have, in some odd sense, found religion, it’s because "Six Feet Under" creator Alan Ball lured them into the tent. Fuller also credits "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the WB-UPN series from writer-producer Joss Wheedon that was sold as part horror comedy part high-school soap but concerned itself with good, evil, fate, redemption and other meaty topics. Like "Buffy," many of these new shows are built around smart, troubled, brave young women who might as well be Buffy’s kid sisters.

"Wheedon’s show really turned a corner for series storytelling," says Fuller, "because it showed that young women could be in situations that were both fantastic and relatable, and instead of shunting women off to the side, it put them at the center."

But there might be more going on here than inspiration and imitation. Like the movie business, the TV industry doesn’t generate programs overnight; almost all the above-mentioned series were in the works, or in their creators’ heads, for years or even decades. That so many of these cosmically inclined programs greenlit around the same time suggests that TV producers, network executives, advertisers, even regular viewers are thinking about these things more pointedly and more often.

"I honestly didn’t think CBS would buy this show," says Barbara Hall, producer of "Joan of Arcadia," who previously worked on the CBS hit "Judging Amy." "But my approach to creating a show has always been, ’Well, I find this stuff interesting and maybe that means other people out there will find it interesting, too.’ I guess CBS was thinking the same way."

Hall says that if death, religion and the hereafter really have become more present in mainstream culture since the late 1990s, it may be recent history’s fault.

First came the turn of the millennium, a calendar milestone that induced apocalyptic fears. Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which amounted to a random mass execution carried globally on live TV.

Hall says she was moved to write "Joan of Arcadia" after watching documentaries about the religious implications of 9/11. "I really do think this whole thing has been brewing in the collective unconscious as far back as when ’The Sixth Sense’ came out, but Sept. 11 really accelerated it," she says. "There was no way to live through that day and not confront issues of life, death and mortality, of good and evil, and whether or not there is some purpose in life."

Hall thinks the new shows also reflect a waning faith in science’s ability to solve all our problems — and a culture-wide admission that life is built on mysteries that might never be solved. "Science was gonna cure cancer, it was gonna give us perfect children," Hall says. "Information and science and reason and reductionist theory were going to show us how to live. Well, none of that has come to pass."

Hall came to terms with this realization by reading about scientific explanations for fate and chance, and biochemical explanations for the human need to believe in God and the afterlife; Hall summarizes this topic as, "The world behind your eyes." (She might be the only producer in network TV who assigns her writing staff a reading list of science books.)

Hall also points out that many of these programs are less interested in asking what happens when we pass on, and more interested in how the living continue to function when the death is all around them.

"They’re not about what happens when we die, they’re about what happens when we live and how we live. Right now a lot of people are confused about how to live."

Ronald Knauf, creator of "Carnivale," is reluctant to pick one possible explanation over any of the others and adds one of his own: "Many people in positions of power in this country are Baby Boomers, and right now a lot of Baby Boomers are having to confront the fact that they’re not going to live forever and they’re not getting any younger."

Whatever the explanation — and whatever stories and style choices the various programs embrace — the core message of these programs is the same: certain eternal questions are so basic, and so big, that they defy easy explanation. And no matter how troubling that notion might seem, we still have to find a way to get through each day, and affect our own lives and others’ lives any way we can.

"To some degree, what all these shows share in common is that there are elements that cannot be weighted, measured or scientifically proven," Knauf says. "It’s the idea of the soul."

Just because the big questions remain unanswered doesn’t mean we can resist asking them. Everybody does it. Knauf has been pondering this stuff obsessively for 15 years, ever since he lost a friend to breast cancer.

"She was a bit older than I was about the time," Knauf says. "She wasn’t even 50 yet. I remember we were doing a vigil, and her husband was there, and she was basically in a coma, and her family and I said to her husband, ’Look, you’ve been awake for 72 hours, you have to step away.’ We were away for no longer than 20 minutes and when we came back, she was gone.

"When I walked into the room to say good-bye to her, Helen wasn’t there. There was an object in the bed. I’ve always been a skeptic, but when you see something like that, you can’t deny the fact that there’s something not there — something that was there just a minute earlier. It can’t be measured. It can’t be weighed. And if you acknowledge the idea of a soul, you have to acknowledge the place where souls reside — an afterlife. I don’t think my experience is in any way unusual."