You have to feel sorry for writer Tim Minear. After his successful work on Lois & Clark, The X-Files and Angel, he's been part of some big failures recently, having worked on shows that were snubbed (Wonderfalls), or cancelled early (Firefly, The Inside, Drive).
I hope his luck improves, because he deserves it after such shoddy treatment by studio execs. It's just been announced that he has a new project in the works with Wonderfalls co-creator Tom Holland (Malcolm In The Middle), called Miracle Man. It's a supernatural drama, produced by Fox for ABC, about a disgraced ex-televangelist, with no faith, who starts performing real miracles.
According to Minnear: "It's about losing everything and starting over and finding that there is a higher purpose in life. It's about a man who says, 'I don't know how to be good, but I'll try to be better.'"
The show's televangelist angle is familiar ground for Minear, whose father worked as a radio engineer for religious programming in Whittier, California. So the area's religious broadcasts were a constant background to Minear's childhood.
Miracle Man is also influenced by sex and accounting scandals that rocked televangelism in the 80s, disgracing beloved preachers like Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Others were exposed as charlatans.
But Minear insists Miracle Man is "a love letter to the religious. I love the genre, and I love stories about redemption and stories about characters that are slightly cynical and nudged by a higher force."
