>Kudos to ABC for standing by its pilot episode of Eli Stone, in which a young defense attorney, suddenly prone to visions of George Michael singing “Faith” in his home and workplace, ends up representing the plaintiff, a mother who claims the mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused autism in her son. The American Academy of Pediatrics demanded the network cancel it, charging ABC with reckless complicity in the potential deaths of children whose parents might be persuaded to forego vaccination. So much for fiction, or reality for that matter: a bit more humility might have helped their cause, given that past policies on immunization caused a true outcry in 1999, when it was found that such preservatives had led to infant mercury levels far above the limits prescribed by the EPA.

And hats off to the show’s creators, Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, for couching this controversial issue in an episode that is anything but a soapbox. Though some of the bothersome trends in recent ABC programming rear their ugly head—too many beautiful rich white people in a polychromatic world where color has less to do with humanity than techniques in the editing room—the writers of Eli Stone have managed that very tricky genre, the dramedy, with a healthy balance of political import, imaginative whimsy, and emotional heft. When Eli learns his visions are the result of a hereditary brain aneurysm that killed his father, the disparate storylines come together in such a way that the recurring trope of “Faith” by way of a Pop 40 song ripples with deeper questions about our faith in science and in God.

But hold on a minute. Do his wacky visions and professional change of heart make Eli Stone a prophet? According to Dr. Chen, his Chinese acupuncturist, they do. Dr. Chen offers a more divine diagnosis of Eli’s condition. “You think I’m a prophet?” Eli responds. “Like Moses?” He says he doesn’t even believe in God, which Dr. Chen promptly contradicts by virtue of the fact that Eli believes in right and wrong, in justice and fairness, in love. “All these things are God,” says Dr. Chen.

I hate to swing the theological axe here, but come on. That God is love does not mean love is God. Anyone who has suffered or inflicted a broken heart, meaning all of us, should grasp the faulty logic of this syllogism. Otherwise we describe a very errant divinity, and we might as well look to the sun to get us through our dark nights of the soul.

Inevitably, Dr. Chen does just that when he points his beer to a pastel western sky and says, “That is also God.” Having grown up in Arizona, I know what it’s like to sense heaven unveiled at sundown. But if Eli Stone does belong to the Mosaic line, as Dr. Chen claims, he will have to remind his mentor in a future episode that Moses rid his people of the pantheistic tendencies they absorbed in Egypt.

I guess the demographics of a society like ours, along with Hollywood’s creedal separation of church and set, call for such spiritual relativism in mainstream media. But it sounds disingenuous when Berlanti says in an interview: “A lot of prophets were crusaders for social justice; they had nothing to do with religion.”

Really? I’d like to see the list, as long as it doesn’t exhibit the same false logic that would make any crusader for social justice a prophet of God. Undoubtedly there’s a longer list of those who had everything to do with religion, from Amos to Martin Luther King, Jr., renegade figures who spoke out of their religious traditions even when taking its principal institution, i.e. the Temple or Church, to task for its neglect of justice and love.

Nevertheless, Eli Stone could be just the guy you want when you’re feeling Lost, the show that precedes it. Perhaps when the Writers Guild strike is over I’ll pitch a show that combines the central conceit of each, about a visionary prophet stranded on an island, and call it Patmos.

But then I might be guilty of contributing to reality television.