The story of a Southern mega-church headed by a family of sly hypocrites. Living in luxury and wielding influence how deep does the spirituality they claim really run? Are their sins products of their own human frailty exacerbated by a difficult world? Or are they bad people pretending to be holy?
It is about time a TV series dealt with the world of organized, profit-motivated religious organizations. A night-time soap take on an African-American mega-church in the Deep South is a novel approach to that telling the stories of people that have not yet been properly told in a fictional construct.
But my praise ends there. A solid cast in an interesting setting largely goes wasted in teleplay scripts so inept that they look like film school dropouts wrote them.
I love night-time soaps. I like the idea for this show as well as the story and the characters and the angle they take in relating the narrative. It is an imagined glimpse into a secret world of powerful people who profess piety and modesty but can't live it and we get to see them at their best and worst. I want to see it get multiple seasons.
But the scripts have to get better. They need to be outlined better and the dialogue needs to be more subtle in relaying information as well as doing so in a natural manner in which real people speak. So far they have tried to cram too much information in each sentence
