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A very guilty pleasure of mine this past year has been watching the semi-nauseating new TV series Jack & Bobby, which I’ve blogged about before here.

It’s show that, being about the childhood of a future president, is
determined to address every social issue with its unique mix of
unusually brazen progressive snobbery, surprising thoughtfulness and
sensitivity, and saccharine p.c. candy coating. It’s quite a feat.
Every episode contains some kind of haughty liberal foot pounding which
is then revealed as sanctimonious pap, but just so you know it’s not
honorable to be conservative, they always end up rephrasing their
scenario so that the supposedly anti-liberal result somehow ends up
suckling from the teat of left-ish effluvia.

This week the show tackled both religious sincerity and abortion. While
the latter of the two stories had a most unusual resolution for a
network TV series (see my post here; caveat about J&B:
the resolution was implied, but could be reversed next week, as there
was no explicit description of what occurred), the way the show dealt
with religion made me cringe with anguish, and I’m just a respectful
secularist.

The show’s main character, Bobby, is an extraordinarily bright
14-year-old who will day be the
super-liberal-Republican-President-who-weathers-a-nuclear-attack-on-U.S.-soil-by-Christian-Extremists
(that’s what this show does: Shock: he’s a republican! But it’s O.K.
because he’s not like those bad ones. Shock! The U.S. is attacked by
Religious Fundamentalists! But naturally they’re homegrown Christians,
who we all know are capable of such evil). Anyway, he is the child of
an insufferably incompetent parent who is also, they say repeatedly, a
brilliant leftist professor. When Bobby starts showing an interest in
religion during a friend’s Bar Mitzvah, she becomes apoplectic at the
thought of him being brainwashed for hatemongers. As usual, the show’s
cagey writers use her for a foil: her attitude is typically pious and
she is eventually made to look a fool and back tracks. Meanwhile, the
show deals with Bobby’s religious yearnings very sincerely and he, a
most likable character, talks sincerely about wanting to accept Christ
(how often do you hear that on network TV without it being implicitly
made fun of?) and how church allows him to escape from the burdens of
his chaotic home life and feel genuine fellowship with other people. Of
course his mother, when hearing he is to be baptized throws another fit
before Bobby’s pastor visits her and effectively throws down, making
his mother reverse and encourage his new faith.

So at this point you’re thinking, how unusual that a show would deal so
positively and seriously with religion commitment. But wait: Bobby is
becoming a Episcopalian (you know, the church of current
Gay-home-wrecker-Bush-critic Gene Robinson; still, Bobby’s mom reacts
furiously: "You’re becoming an Evangelical!") and Bobby’s Baptism rite
sounds cribbed from the Gospel of gooey liberal piety:

"Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?" Whatever!

So typical, and for some reason I love it, even though every episode has me swearing at their little tricks.

As far as the abortion sub-plot goes, I admire that the show’s other
main character, Jack (16 or 17) is so decent at his core that he was
considering marrying his pregnant ex-girlfriend, that is until the
writers saved him from the dilemma. Not so decent and honorable was the
girl’s conservative Christian pastor father (played by eco-geeko Ed
Begley Jr.) who threw her out of the house when she refused to marry
the real father. Don’t forget that there are bad Christians!

I also have to note that that during the final sequence, juxtaposing
Bobby’s baptism with his mother escorting the pregnant girl to planned
parenthood (yes, it appears to have been a rare TV abortion), the music
played was "Amazing Grace." Grace also happens to be the first name of
Bobby’s Marxist mother.

What a show.

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