Posted by Dan Ewert : 12/29/2002 10:14:00 PM (Archive Link)
On the flight home from Hawaii, one of the in-flight entertainment offerings was an episode of Touched By An Angel. This has to be the cheesiest television series since The Flying Nun. I had watched parts of it here and there, enough to get the gist of the show, but this was my first whole episode. Here are some observations:

The angels can never seem to just go and help only one person. They have to help three or four at once. In this episode, they helped a girl with OCD, her father who couldn’t read, an epileptic friend of the girl’s and the girl’s mother. It’s as if there’s an angel shortage in Heaven, so unless you can be efficient and cover several people at once, it’s not worth the trouble.

There are always at least two angels working each case… usually more. The episode I saw had four on duty putting in time for this one situation. The angels must be part of a union. If you look in the Bible, there’s never more than two angels who are active at a given time.

The angels get surprised. In this episode (again), they return to the girl’s hospital room to discover she has fled with her father… and they’re surprised. It’s unfortunate they’re not supposed to be in contact with an omnipotent deity who could have informed them of the people’s departure before they got there. Oh wait… they actually are supposed to. Can they not at least do walkie-talkies?

The angels are utterly unable to get through a mission without revealing that they are in fact angels. They’ll be going along, throwing their marks’ lives into chaos until something wholly unexpected (to them) happens and they can’t think of any way to repair the situation without appearing to the people and playing the trump card. I think God’s mysterious nature would start being dispelled when alien visitations start being outnumbered by revealed angel touchings. I think a good drinking game would involve how long it takes before an angel actually tells a human who they are.


These angels really aren’t much like the Biblical variety. In the Bible, angels had two primary functions… relaying messages and destroying things. They’re a class of creation and beings that is wholly separate from humans and what we’re familiar with. There’s not much mention of them whispering encouragement in people’s ears and they certainly didn’t have some big learning curve like in the show. On TV, the angels are learning life lessons every week. In the Bible, the angels already knew what was going on. And when they did reveal themselves, people typically were filled with awe and bowed down before the angel thinking the angel himself was God. Well, I could go on but don’t mistake a giant supernatural warrior with Roma Downey.

One thing I noticed is that if you were an actor on the show, you would quickly develop lines on your forehead due to the raised-eyebrow, concerned look you must always have. The only emotion the angels are allowed to have is that of worried concern.

In short, Touched By An Angel is big-time cheese and this is coming from a Christian. While some people would say the show is good since it shows the softer side of God, so to speak, I think it completely white-washes spiritual transformation in real life and makes it seem like it can’t happen without some meddling angel spilling some beans.