Charles Murray is an avid viewer of the TV series “The Big C.”

The Big C is a television series starring Laura Linney as Cathy Jamison, a Minneapolis high school teacher and housewife who is diagnosed with terminal melanoma. I’m a big fan of the show. Linney is flat-out brilliant. Black comedy is hard to pull off, and the writers mostly succeed. The plots seldom take easy outs.

What he finds remarkable about the show is the total lack of religious content.

There is no mention of a religious upbringing that Cathy has rejected. No role for a clergyman who tries to bring the consolation of Christianity to Cathy but fails. For practical purposes, the Minneapolis of The Big C is a world in which the religion on which Western civilization is founded is not just wrong, but does not exist…..

…Hollywood in the last few decades has been weird when it comes to religion. There’s no shortage of plots with an afterlife, ghosts coming back to guide the living, and supernatural events. But there’s a big shortage of plots that incorporate adult, thoughtful, and nuanced spiritual considerations—the kinds in which Christianity abounds, whether or not you are a believer—into the way that characters live their lives. Of all the gulfs that separate Hollywood from the rest of America, that one may be the widest. The Big C, produced and written by people who are not only smart but adult, thoughtful, and nuanced in everything aside from spirituality, is an exemplar of that gulf.

I couldn’t agree more.  I miss the show Touched by an Angel.