The original post: /r/television by /u/JB92103 on 2024-09-21 14:05:14.
TBAA Intro (“Walk With You” performed by Della Resse)
Whenever I was home sick from school, my very religious mom would put on a DVD of Touched by an Angel and we’d watch the episodes together. I remember the first time this happened (I was about 8 years old or so) we started off with the first episode of the show, “The Southbound Bus”. At first, I was unimpressed. The first words I said to my mom when I saw the first scene was “You said this was a good show, Mom. This looks boring. What’s so interesting about watching a red-haired woman with an Irish accent and wearing a white dress suddenly appearing out of nowhere in a desert before sitting down at a bus stop to talk to an older Black woman?”. My mom then told me to wait and see. I shrugged and said “Ok, if you say so.” But then I saw the scene where Monica helped the boy she met on the bus stand up to a group of bullies a lot older than him, and I started to warm up to it, especially since I regularly got bullied myself by the older kids on the school bus.
As I got older and watched more episodes, I noticed something strangely alluring about it. Sometimes I think it was Monica’s thick Irish accent (and that long auburn hair of hers) or the fact that Tess reminded me so much of my no-nonsense great aunt (may God rest her soul), but now that I’m an adult, I realize it’s the fact that this show, despite its constant reminders that God loves His children, wasn’t afraid to have dark endings every once in a while. You’d think a show about angels and God would have every episode end happily (and most of them did), but it was those few episodes with unhappy endings that especially got younger me hooked.
TBAA is a show most people would consider Christian propaganda. In terms of TV dramas as a whole, it’s mid. It’s never gonna be looked upon as one of the greatest TV shows in history, like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or Lost, but that’s fine. This show never needed to be the GOAT of TV shows. It’s like the comfort food of dramas, there’s no real nutritional value, but dang, does it taste good while also reminding you of your grandma’s home cooking. As one reviewer put it back when this show premiered on CBS back in 1994, “viewers with low tolerance for precious whimsy will probably find they have overdosed on pixie dust within the first 10 minutes.” And after rewatching the show recently, it’s easy to see why some people would think that. The first season was especially light-hearted in tone, even feeling kind of comedic in a sense at times. I still laugh every time I think about Monica just casually chugging a bottle of hot sauce in a bar.
Monica early on in the show reminded me of a young child who goes to church with their family every Sunday. Early on in their lives, all they have is their faith in God, and they’ve yet to be exposed to the very clear and obvious flaws with humanity that usually tend to erode that faith (Source: I was one of those kids. I still believe in God, but I’m not nearly as religious as I used to be). But with her, it was unique, as before the show, she had only encountered humans who were in near-death situations (i.e., her leading a Native American man who was stuck outside during a raging blizzard to shelter, or her temporarily taking the wheel of a car whose driver was falling asleep in the middle of an interstate) while being a part of search and rescue.
In the first couple of seasons, the slightly naive yet kind-hearted Monica tended to either get sidetracked or let her feelings get in the way during her assignments, which sometimes got her in trouble, like in the 1st episode where she left her assignment to find the boy’s mother who left home after the boy’s little sister tragically died, or in another episode when she wanted to stop a woman from committing s*****e via drowning despite her fear of water, but had to be reminded by Adam, the first Angel of Death on the show (played by Charles Rocket) that as an angel, she couldn’t interfere with the woman’s free will, leading Monica to instead have to show the woman what would’ve happened to her loved ones if she died, managing to get her to change her mind and ask God for help. This would often lead to Tess having to pull her aside and give her advice to get her back on track. There are more examples, but those are the two that came to my head. It was formulaic, but it made sense. Before she was promoted to caseworker, it was established in the first episode that Monica had only maintained human form for a few minutes at a time while she was part of search and rescue, which meant this was the first time she ever experienced what humanity was truly like for long periods. Compare that to Tess, an angel who’d been a caseworker during the time of Ancient Rome before being promoted herself to supervisor.
On a side note, I recently found out that Roma Downey and Della Resse (RIP) were really good friends offscreen just like they were onscreen, and it’s easy to see why. RD and DR did a great job selling Monica and Tess’s friendship (and you could easily argue, daughter-mother-like relationship) to the audience.
Anyway, as the show progressed and Andrew (played by the late John Dye) and later Gloria (played by Valerie Bertinelli, more on her later) joined the duo, Monica slowly learned how to keep herself from getting too emotionally involved during her assignments while also learning more about humans in general and in return, she became a better caseworker and a better angel for it. Sure, there were times she fell into the Devil’s traps, including a few times she had to go up against an old friend turned fallen angel named Kathleen (played by Jasmine Guy), who always tried to screw up her assignments, or even the few times where she had to take on Satan himself. Monica even had an evil twin named Monique who popped up a couple of times to cause some trouble (you could tell RD had a little fun playing her lol).
Although Tess was a LOT more experienced in dealing with humanity than Monica, that’s not to say she didn’t go through some growth of her own during the show. There were a few times she let her anger get the best of her. One episode in particular involved one of Tess’s old assignments trying to stop an AIDS hospice center from opening and Sam, an archangel (played by the late Paul Winfield) had to take over her job until she learned to fight hate with love. It’s basic character development 101, but I can appreciate it.
I don’t have much to say about Andrew as he’s the most boring of all the angels IMO (not to say John Dye didn’t do a great job with what we got).
Gloria, who came around as TBAA approached its end, reminded me of the stereotypical, naive little sister who tagged along with her older siblings. And yet, I don’t dislike her character for it. She’s not just new at being a caseworker, she’s new about being an angel period, as God created her near the end of Season 7 and gave her to Tess, Monica and Andrew to train. She tended to overexplain things sometime, which to most people would probably get annoying after a few episodes (although the show was already starting to get abysmal ratings by the time she came around), but to someone who has ADHD and Autism, it made me empathize with her.
Speaking of which, for as little as people knew about the spectrum back when the show was on, it did a fairly good job handling the subject. I especially appreciated watching Monica’s friendship with Joey, a developmentally disabled young man who appeared a few times on the show alongside his brother, Wayne (played by Randy Travis) and even played a pretty significant role in the 2-part series finale in 2003. They even had an angel with Down Syndrome (played by Chris Burke) appear during a couple of episodes.
Speaking of the series finale, younger me never cried as much while watching a TV show before I watched that. The final shot of Monica driving off into the very same desert she first arrived at during the beginning of TBAA broke me for about a week. Thank God Martha Williamson took over as showrunner after John Masius (the creator of TBAA) was fired, because I don’t think the show would’ve lasted nearly as long as it did if we got Masius’s version instead.
Anyway, that’s the end of my thoughts. Props to you if you made it this far. Funnily enough, I share the same birthday as this show (September 21st).