Divine Programming: Negotiating Christianity in American Dramatic Television Production 1996–2016 explores how Hollywood television creatives—writers, producers, and executives—define the stories they tell as “religious” or “not-religious” at a moment when television itself has shifted dramatically. Howell, a scholar of television studies, emphasizes that the people who create television define religion to their imagined audiences through representations of religion. This book argues that religious, specifically Christian, representations morphed from “safe, inoffensive religiousness” to “diverse, sometimes challenging, and even edgy representational modes” even though television creatives do not always identify those representations as religious (9). Howell examines the development, writing, producing, marketing, and positioning of several specific dramatic television series.

Divine Programming's scope includes those television programs that significantly engage with Christianity as a religion “that reflects in some way the Christianity that the majority of Americans practice” (4–5). For Howell, white Christianity has become synonymous with “religion” and thus Hollywood creatives are able to use white Christian elements without overtly labeling their work as Christian. For Howell, television as an industry cycled through a few different eras from 1996 to 2016 as it moved from an imagined mass audience toward niche audiences. Divine Programming starts with 7th Heaven and Touched By An Angel, which are the primary vehicles of religious representation that later television creatives tried to work against. They had overly sweet and literally angelic versions of religion. By the mid-2010s, middlebrow audiences had been displaced by upscale viewers with “high-speed internet and subscription packages” watching post-network Battlestar Galactica and Peak TV Preacher (4).

Throughout Howell's interviews and research, she demonstrates how Hollywood creatives make assumptions about the tastes, and religious understandings, of niche audiences. Overtly Christian representation, at least that which portrayed Christianity in positive and soft ways, was risky because Peak TV audiences would not like the shows, limiting any critical acclaim. Howell marks the complexities of Christianity by separating out racial and geographic differences. Greenleaf and Jane the Virgin portray ethnic and racial religious characters and plotlines, while Friday Night Lights and Rectify show Christianity as part of the culture of the American South. Howell maps how regionality and race complicate Christianity, giving it an “authentic[ity]” missing from other representations (77). Howell's interlocutors ignore the religion represented on critically acclaimed shows like Big Love and True Detective because those are seen as fringe practices or cults. Further, fantastic genres distance their television shows from religion by labeling representations as spiritual or mythological. While religion scholars might argue with them, Howell's television creatives see “spirituality” and “mythology” as separate in their work from that of “religious” programming. Nevertheless, religion in dramatic television programming shifted from “little to no containment of Christianity to distancing, displacement, outright dismissal, and finally acknowledgement and utilization” between 1996 and 2016 (24).

Divine Programming demystifies aspects of the television industry for those unfamiliar with the business. Howell's methods include analyzing content, marketing materials, articles in trade press, and religious iconography in visual culture. But beyond interpreting the content of the programs, Divine Programming includes in-depth interviews with television creatives who have made shows like Supernatural, Friday Night Lights, and Battlestar Galactica. Howell used snowball sampling to collect interlocutors and focused on their television industry experience, not “personal subjects such as their religious backgrounds” (19). While as a religion scholar I wanted to know more about the religious experiences and identities of television creators, by the end of the book, I realized that, because of the television industry subculture, a religious studies approach may not have elicited in-depth interviews with interviewees who see religion as something to contain or deemphasize. Generally, this research focuses on television production, and imagined audiences are key to how religion is portrayed. Industry creatives want to distance themselves from explicit representations of Christianity to contain middlebrow and politically conservative ideas of white Christianity in order to produce television catering to elite and upscale audiences. For those of us outside television studies, I found myself wanting to know more about how those audiences are imagined and who constructs those audiences.

From a religion scholar perspective, Howell takes as fact sensibilities I want to contextualize. I wish Howell would have clarified the connection between white Christianity and the idea of “religion.” She articulates post-Christianity and media theory arguments that Christianity permeates the meta-narrative of the culture, and thus, even though Hollywood production cultures may not see themselves as articulating Christian tropes and themes, Christianity is legible beyond “denominational schisms” (8). But I found myself not fully connecting how that recognizable Christianity is the same as conflating Christianity and religion. Part of the problem is disciplinary: media scholars do not generally explore historical and contextual intricacies of the American religious landscape. While I wanted more granularity, I applaud Howell for her ethnographic perspective, allowing her interlocutors’ logics to define the scope of the project, thus amplifying the television creators’ language of containment, denial, and avoidance.

Ultimately, Howell's book furthers the work done by Diane Winston in her anthology Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion (Baylor University Press, 2008), as well as Lynn Schofield Clark's From Angels and Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003). But whereas Winston comes at the topic from a religious studies perspective and media scholar Schofield Clark conducts reception studies, Howell's research and interviews help us see inside the minds of those who create the media, images, and narratives society engages with on a daily basis. Television programs have the ability to define and influence our worlds, and now, with Divine Programming, we are able to know more about how the creators of those dramatic programs recognize and represent religion and Christianity.