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Each week, Christianity Today'sFilm Forum summarizes and links to several online sites that review current movies from a religious perspective. Many of these sites also comment on mainstream music. However, very few do the same for television.

This is not to say Christian sites do not comment on television. Many do, but they do it as media watchdogs instead of as media critics. You can easily find out how much sexuality or violence is in a show, but it is hard to find religious critics to tell you about a program's artistic merit or entertainment value.

American Family Association offers action alerts on television programs and commercials. The Dove Foundation reviews television movies. Christian Spotlight and Parents Television Council rate shows based on their family-appropriateness. And a handful of other sites exist but are apparently rarely updated. Focus on the Family's online site for its Plugged In magazine is perhaps the only site out there regularly giving full reviews of shows—but primarily in a watchdog fashion.

Why don't Christian critics analyze the creative content of television as they do with movies? It may be a question best left to TV detectives.

The halfway point of the 2001-02 TV season has now arrived, providing a good time to look at the new shows making headlines and building audiences , including: 24, Alias, Doc, Maybe It's Me, Scrubs, Undeclared, Philly, and Enterprise.

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One of the most critically acclaimed new shows of the season (though its ratings haven't even broken the top 25) has been Fox's ground breaking and inventive 24. The season will be composed of 24 hour-long episodes shown in real time. An hour for the viewer covers an hour for the characters. In its entirety, the suspense-driven season will depict one day in the life of CIA counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). And it's a bad day at that.

Someone's trying to kill a presidential candidate, the assassins are holding Bauer's wife and daughter, and there's a mole in his division. But that's only a fraction of the subplots going on. At this point in the season, it's only 8 a.m. (eight episodes have been aired) and there have already been multiple twists and turns, deaths, gunfights, and sexual encounters. No one has yet used the restroom.

Focus on the Family'sPlugged In says, "If good drama was strictly about keeping us on the edge of our seats, 24 would be an enviable success." However, the magazine suggests, there's more to good TV than gun battles and conflict. The review warns that the show's intense and sustained violence and sexuality outweigh the value of its inventiveness and suspense.

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Sutherland's vehicle is one of two new shows this year up for the Golden Globe award for best drama series. The other, ABC's Alias, is also known for edge-of-the-seat suspense—and it too deals with the CIA.

Like many graduate students, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) has a part-time job in addition to classes. Instead of working on campus or at the local coffee shop, she dabbles in espionage. In her freshman year of college, Sydney was recruited to work for an organization called SD-6, which she was told was a top-secret division of the CIA. However in the pilot episode, she discovered that SD-6 was not really part of the CIA but a rival agency. Now, she is a double agent working for the CIA to expose SD-6.

Focus on the Family says that Alias combines high-energy action and brain-twisting espionage. "Storytelling is tight. Plot lines are clever," the Plugged In review says. "And it targets young adults with heat-seeking efficiency."

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46