Just What Is CW’s The Messengers Trying to Say?

I used to dread reviewing shows from The CW. Every new program seemed like pap for the not-so-discerning adolescent, and there are only so many brooding, wavy-haired male models masquerading as actors that one 40-something critic can deal with.

But in the last couple of years, something strange has been happening on The CW. The programming has gotten kinda … good.

It became obvious with Jane the Virgin, one of the oddest, funniest shows on TV. I haven’t seen iZombie—the story of a pretty dead thing searching for the meaning of, um, life—but I hear that it’s surprisingly witty. The Flash and Arrow are both competent, creative and often compelling superhero stories. And while I still avoid Beauty and the Beast and The Vampire Diaries whenever I can, my Supernatural-loving daughter has forced me to even re-evaluate (a little) CW’s longest-running show.

The CW continues its upward trajectory when it unveils The Messengers tonight. And while this supernatural drama won’t probably challenge Mad Men for an Emmy just yet, it does illustrate how far the network has come since Sam and Dean Winchester first started traveling the roads of America looking for demons to kill. And it feels less theologically messy, too.

Like Supernatural, The Messengers is rooted in a cosmic battle of good and evil. But while the former show feels like the writers learned most of their most of their theology from video games, The Messengers takes faith a little more seriously (albeit in a very CW sort of way).

A meteor crashes to earth in the pilot, carrying with it fire, brimstone and a mysterious passenger who seems up to no good. But the meteor also seems to have been accompanied by some more positive energy. When the asteroid hits earth, it also knocks a few people for the proverbial loop—sending them to death’s door and then yanking them back. And it seems  the psychic blast may have impacted them all differently. Erin, a pretty young mother, somehow heals her daughter almost instantaneously after she was involved in a serious accident. Peter, a high school swimmer, is given super strength to beat off, and kill, his own obligatory bully. Joshua, son of a Houston televangelist, believes he’s seen the face of God and the coming apocalypse—a message that seriously freaks out his hypocritical dad. And pops tells Joshua that, if he keeps preaching this dark vision of his, he’ll find himself out of his church.

“It’s not your church,” Joshua tells him. “It’s God’s church.”

That’s not the sort of language one typically expects to hear on a network drama. But it’s in this one. The Messengers is predicated not just on supernatural weirdness, but on faith. And The CW is making sure we know it.

Now, obviously the trailer doesn’t exactly strike me as the work of a theologian. This is still a network television show for a religiously pluralistic audience. Executive producer Trey Calloway was raised Presbyterian but converted to Judaism as an adult, and he told a roomful of reporters that The Messengers‘ writing staff is made up of people from all sorts of religious backgrounds. And I’m sure that, by the end of the season, one of our big takeaway lessons will be to never expect apocalyptic fidelity from a CW show.

But it does tell us that there is good and evil in this world—that God is real, and so is the devil. Calloway told reporters that the show is about faith—”faith in powers greater than anything you ever imagined.” And he hopes the show’s own message will be one of hope in a troubled, chaotic world. That’s encouraging. And if a show like The Messengers also encourages a teen or two to look at their own faith a little more closely, well, so much the better.