Tru Calling and Joan of Arcadia are among the new shows tackling the issues of death and God this season ANTHONY MANDLER/FOX Tru Davies (Eliza Dushku) discovers that she can relive a day in her life, enabling her to prevent tragedies in the lives of those around her in the new Fox series, "Tru Calling."

Cape Cod Times - Lifestyles and Arts September 26, 2003 Voices From Above and Beyond By Lisa de Moraes The Washington Post

Hysterical women are quite the rage this season.

Make that pretty young hysterical women. Women who hear voices, who chat with dead people, who talk to God in the form of a cute high school boy they’d like to kiss.

Middle-aged females who act like angels and talk to God are out. So are their gray-haired evangelical sidekicks.

Also banished are big-haired thirty-something doctors chatting with their dead mothers. Network executives have driven them from their prime-time lineups. That’s because they are all chasing younger viewers, and younger viewers, although not averse to watching shows about talking to God or dead people, are certainly not going to get caught watching a show about an old person talking to God or dead people. Can you blame them ?

This year’s bumper crop of cuties with a very special skills set includes CBS’s "Joan of Arcadia" — as in Joan of Arc, get it ? — who is ordered by God to do seemingly mundane things, such as get a job at the local bookstore. But doing so inspires her wheelchair-using brother to stop feeling sorry for himself and rejoin the human race, making Joan’s family very happy. End of Episode No. 1.

Fox’s "Tru Calling" is about a young night-shift morgue worker who is allowed, by some mysterious force, to relive the day if one of the folks on the slabs asks for her help. The same network has also scheduled for midseason a series called "Wonderfalls." It’s about a moody young philosophy grad named Jaye Tyler who gets ordered about not by God but by a grumpy little plastic lion and other toy animals for sale in the Niagara Falls souvenir shop where she is slowly dying of boredom behind the cash register. Jaye’s also ordered to do mundane things, which lead to a UPS driver finding a girlfriend and an unpleasant tourist reuniting with her stolen purse. Todd Holland, executive producer of "Wonderfalls," calls it "Touched by a Crazy Person."

Brooding Teens, carnival freaks The creator of "Wonderfalls," Bryan Fuller, is the same guy who created Showtime’s "Dead Like Me," about a brooding teenage girl killed by a chunk of falling space station who now helps dead people adjust to the afterlife ; "Dead" ends its first season Sept. 26 and has been ordered for another.

Add to this mix HBO’s new series "Carnivale," a struggle between good (a fugitive) and evil (an evangelical minister) during the Great Depression, and yet another new Fox drama series, called "Still Life," about a dysfunctional family. It’s narrated by the recently deceased older son. Now you have what some of the shows’ producers, as well as some critics, are calling the Season of Spirituality. That is except for Barbara Hall, creator of "Joan of Arcadia," who when asked to explain this phenomenon at the summer TV press tour, said it had to do with "the Jungian philosophy of the collective unconscious." Don’t you just hate showoffs ?

The believers say Americans got spiritual after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Of course Americans also got polite while behind the wheel of a car after the terrorist attacks, but they got over that long before tomorrow’s start of the new TV season.

The TV season that wrapped in May was the first developed after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But instead of jamming their slates with spiritual series, broadcast network suits last year jammed them with procedural crime dramas and comedies about dull, pudgy middle-aged men with hot younger wives. One network even picked up a watch-for-cash mystery series called "Push, Nevada" from Ben Affleck. Even God can’t explain that one.

They hear dead people Series in which folks are given direction by God, some mysterious force, or chat with dead people are not a post- Sept. 11 phenomenon. Remember "Touched by an Angel," "Providence," "Brimstone" — okay, you probably don’t remember that one ; it starred Peter Horton as a dead cop who went to Hell but was returned to Earth by Satan to recapture a bunch of escaped evil spirits. But surely you remember "Highway to Heaven," "Early Edition," "Nothing Sacred," "My Mother the Car" ?

This season’s slew of such shows more likely owes its existence to, among other things, the success of HBO’s "Six Feet Under," about an undertaking family whose members regularly chat with the clients they’re about to plant and which begins every episode with a wacky death that’s sure to be the next day’s water cooler talk.

Unlike "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos," those other two HBO hits over which broadcasters have salivated for years, "Six Feet Under" is a series that actually could air on broadcast prime-time TV. This has not been lost on broadcasters.

They’re also aware that there’s that whole group of young viewers looking for their next good-vs.-evil fix after losing their much-beloved "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" last season. Not coincidentally, Fox has cast "Buffy" alum Eliza Dushku as Tru Davies in its new "Tru Calling."

Three of these new, so-called spiritual series are airing on Fox. It’s as though Fox has finally noticed that WB’s "Seventh Heaven" is, let’s face it, just "Beverly Hills, 90210" with a minister dad, but that the veneer of spirituality keeps advertisers happy and on the series no matter how hormonal the teens or how juicy the story line.

A new "Touched" ? CBS was bound to try to replicate the success of "Touched by an Angel," which it canceled in May, but in a way that would attract the younger audience it’s working so hard to attract. Which is why the addition of "Joan of Arcadia" to the CBS schedule was no surprise, though CBS suits insisted it was not their next "Touched." Still, it had all the hallmarks of CBS Development 101. "Joan" stars Amber Tamblyn, a much younger actress than "Touched" star Roma Downey. Tamblyn will be known to young viewers from her role on the summer hit flick "The Ring," but will also be familiar to CBS’s core older viewers from her six years on the CBS daytime soap "General Hospital." Tamblyn’s parents have been cast up : They’ll be played by Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen, to further lock in the core CBS crowd.

Which is why it was so odd to hear Hall at the summer TV press tour telling critics that when she was pitching her new CBS series, "it raised a lot of eyebrows . . . and I thought, you know what, I’m never getting anywhere with this."

"Still Life" co-executive producer Marti Noxon gave the best explanation to critics back in July when they were wondering why there were so many new shows on the schedules featuring these smart, troubled young women who talk to God, talk to the dead, as well as other shows with a focus on death.

"There’s death and taxes, and TV shows about taxes are just not that interesting."

Tuning in :

* "Joan of Arcadia" : 8 p.m. Fridays on CBS, debuts tonight.

* "Dead Like Me" : 10 p.m. Fridays on Showtimes ; season finale tonight.

* "Carnivale" : 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO

* "Tru Calling" : 8 p.m. Thursdays, debuts October 30