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Dave Alan Johnson, along with his brother created the PAX television show Doc. The show follows a small-town Montana doctor (Billy Ray Cyrus) who followed a woman to New York. The girl leaves him, but he soon realizes that he was meant to be in the city. Johnson has extensive television credits, including a 1996 collaboration with Steven Spielberg called High Incidence.

How did your own faith journey get started?

I was raised in a Christian home and have believed since an early age. But like many people, I never really understood what that meant. It's probably been in the last 10 to 15 years that I have understood what it all means.

I then realized why I'd been placed where I'd been placed. I had created shows for all the networks. I was on the top of everybody's A-list. I was a believer and I thought I was doing God's work, but I just didn't have a complete peace.

Hollywood is a tough place because people lie to you on a daily basis and cheat you and stab you in the back. One day I went home to my wife after continually feeling beaten up and said, "I just want to go be a missionary someplace. Let's just forget all this."

She looked at me and she said, "Name me one place on earth that needs missionaries more than where you are right now."

I still can't talk about that without getting choked up. That moment changed my life. I realized why I had been placed where I'd been placed and why I had been given the gifts I have been given.

What changed at that point?

I was still doing the same things, but I had a renewed sense of purpose. I learned something very valuable during that time, which was that products come and go. TV shows come and go. If God wants a God-honoring show on the air, he'll put one on.

God put me in the path of 100 to 150 people's lives on a daily basis who looked at me as their boss. And I was the only Bible a lot of those people were ever going to see.

Does Hollywood understand the spiritual interest in America now?

No. They really don't. It never ceases to amaze me the level of blindness and darkness that is in this place.

I had the president of a network tell me once that Touched By An Angel was a complete fluke and that nothing about God ever works on TV. If they had done a show about an evil plumber that was doing what that show was, there would be five other shows about an evil carpenter, or an evil truck driver in the works.

How did Doc come about?

I had done work for Jeff Sagansky, the president of PAX, when he was at CBS. He called me up and said, "Do you want to come do something for us?" I went over there and kicked around some possible ideas for a TV show.

How did you end up casting Billy Ray Cyrus as the lead?

My casting director came in one day and said, "Would you guys be interested in Billy Ray Cyrus for this role?" And I said, "No, not really." The achy-breaky guy with the long hair and stuff wasn't what I had in mind.

She came back a couple days later and said that he really wanted to come in and read. He offered to fly himself out. I said, "Well, who are we that we wouldn't meet somebody?" So I told the casting director to tell him to come on by but that we were not asking him to come out. We'd happily see him but I didn't want there to be a misunderstanding.

He walked in and he looked completely different. His hair was different. Everything about him was different. Immediately I just looked at him and said, "Wow, he really looks right for the part."

It was obvious in, literally, five minutes as he told us his testimony and we told him ours that this was a divine appointment and this was meant to be.

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October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46