TV is the New Reading

‘Saving Grace’ a winner for TNT

While home to enormous pain and loss, the universe also provides for miracles and collosal do-overs, and last-chance angels lurk where we least realize we need them.

That’s the story behind Nancy Miller’s new dramatic series “Saving Grace,” airing Mondays at 9 p.m. on TNT.

At the center of the story is highly functional alcoholic Oklahoma City police detective named Grace Hanadarko, played magnificently by Academy Award-winner Holly Hunter. She’s sleeping with her married partner Det. Ham Dewey played by Kenny Johnson of “The Shield,” among other casual hookups, and hanging out with her friend Rhetta Rodriguez, a county examiner played imperfectly by Laura San Giacomo, who is indeed beautiful but looks really out of place both on a barstool and in a lab coat.

After getting kicked off a high-profile case for reasons too tedious to mention, Hanadarko gets plastered, hops behind the wheel of her car and smashes into someone.

She’s horrified at what she’s done, and frightened by the appearance of a chaw-spittin’ angel named Earl, played adequately by Leon Rippy. Earl pulls her out of the situation to a plateau towering above the Grand Canyon, and poof! it’s like the vehicular manslaughter never really happened.

Even so, her shirt is spattered with the victim’s blood from when she tried performing mouth-to-mouth, and there’s sand in her boots from the Grand Canyon, and her victim (who, apparently, has the same last-chance angel she does) experienced the whole incident as a dream.

She’s freaked out enough to talk to her brother, a priest played by Tom Irwin, who I love but not in this role. Irwin’s character is meant to represent an unspiritual, structural faith of organized religion, something this show is also clearly planning to discuss in greater detail. She’s upset by this vision she’s had and he’s asking if she’s prayed or attended services. It would be hard to ignore the judgment in his voice, and to top it off, as she’s leaving his office instead of a hug, he hands her a Bible.

True, she’s clearly put him through a lot in their lives, but it seems like the message in this case is if you need to talk to God, go straight to the source and don’t bother with middle management.

Other spiritual struggles touched on in the deeply written pilot episode were the effects of heavy metal music on unstable teens, the facing of tremendous losses like child abduction or the Oklahoma City bombing, and what stories we tell ourselves to try to make sense of the violent and destructive world we live in.

Schedulewise, the show follows Kyra Segdwick’s “The Closer” and carries an MA rating for excellent reasons, including nudity, violence and strong language. These aspects were occasionally a little gratuitous but mostly fit with the story that was being told. After all, when the main character is trying to deal every day with the fact that if she hadn’t been screwing around 10 years ago, her sister might still be alive and her nephew might still have a mom, you can expect the show to stride fearlessly into nearly any storyline.

And after a couple of disappointing attempts to force lightning to strike twice in its Monday night lineup – most notably “Saved” and “Heartland” – TNT may have hit on the right mix with “Saving Grace,” an edgy drama centered on the out-of-control life of a woman in the throes of spiritual crisis. It’s incredibly interesting, raises some excellent discussion and gives the viewer plenty to think about while remaining an engaging and at times eye-popping drama.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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