Those who complain that Hollywood seldom depicts religion as a normal and good part of films’ and TV’s central characters’ lives are correct that the incidence is much lower in the media than in society as a whole. This is another reminder that it’s important to be careful what you pray for. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which runs Thursday nights on the FX Channel at 10 EDT and is available on ITunes, follows the lives of four post-college slackers who run an Irish bar in the title city, and religion, specifically Christianity and more specifically Catholicism, keeps popping up in the characters’ lives. The overall tone of the show is fairly spicy, and the humor is both funny and often deliberately edgy, but the treatment of religion is pretty realistic given the characters’ situation. It is also both irreverent and basically positive. The religion the principal characters were taught as a child in working-class Philly often comes up in conversation as they discuss, for example, some of their more shameless schemes. In addition, situations and characters with religious significance arrive on a regular basis. Last Thursday such a character arrived in the form of a priest who had served

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Volume 1 of the satirical animated TV series Pinky and the Brain is now available on DVD.   The program, which first ran in syndication during the mid to late 1990s, follows the adventures of two escaped lab mice, one a genius and the other insane, who are on a mission to take over the world, planned and led by the genius one, the Brain. The show was a spinoff of the Steven  Spielberg-produced Animaniacs, and was a good deal better than its parent program. What made Pinky and the Brain so effective was its superior writing. The program was full of satire and parodies, and the scripts were  top-notch.  The show’s puckish mockery of schemes to run other people’s lives gives it a nice, understated political and social relevance, and the absurdity of Brain’s schemes for doing so points up the emptiness of his ambitions. Instead of achieving success by doing some good for people (or at least for other lab mice), Brain simply craves power. In this, Brain is a part of ourselves exaggerated to highly comic proportions. Pinky and the Brain is a funny show that actually manages to remind us of some basic truths about ourselves.

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I’m ambivalent about the BBC-TV series Hex, which runs on Thurday nights at 10 p.m. EDT on BBC America. Yes, it can be seen as a ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as it is set at an elite English boarding school and deals with spiritual warfare surrounding and involving the student body of oversexed teens and their clueless and/or evil overseers. And yes, the premise of the program  is based on a mixture of Christian theology and odd bits of superstition, other religions, and simple chaos. Plus, the first few episodes are rather slow going, with a good deal of unnecessary meandering and chitchat. Plus there is a heck of a lot of venery going on, all of it outside of marriage, which many religious people don’t like to see on their TVs. Nonetheless, the show is interesting and entertaining. Cassie, an attractive but shy young student, finds out that she is descended from witches and is at the center of a plot by demons to bring back the Nephilim, a race of giants mentioned in the Bible (e.g., Genesis 6:2) that was created when human women mated with demons (as one understanding has it). This is an actual

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