Reasonable doubt?

Given the popularity of books and films about people who claim to have visited heaven during near-death experiences, it’s surprising no television studios have thought to produce a scripted series exploiting the trend until now. On June 16, TNT premiered Proof, a new drama starring Jennifer Beals as a hard-nosed cardiothoracic surgeon hired by a dying tech billionaire to find evidence of an afterlife.

Actually, hired isn’t quite the right word. Ivan Turing (Matthew Modine doing his best Steve Jobs impersonation) offers to leave Dr. Carolyn Tyler (Beals) his entire estate if she will simply investigate the question as best she can. Obviously, this arrangement poses some plotting challenges as any reasonable person not constrained by religious ethics would simply scrape together a few Heaven Is for Real–style case studies while waiting to collect her massive payday. Terminal billionaire wants to leave me all his money; I’m a normal, relatable human so I would like to have all his money. Where’s the conflict?

The show’s writers immediately establish it by demonstrating in no uncertain terms that Carolyn is a skeptic with a capital “S”—a Dana Scully on steroids, if you will—so dismissive of near-death tales that even the prospect of dazzling material wealth doesn’t penetrate her lofty cynicism. She is also, as she announces repeatedly and grouchily, “a woman of science.” Indeed she’s so proud of her medical prowess that she’s almost unlikable, and it’s likely we wouldn’t root for her at all if we didn’t soon learn that much of her hardness stems from (1) her pain of losing her teenage son in a car accident and (2) her sublimated confusion at having had a near-death experience herself. That may seem like a lot of convenient coincidences shoehorned together to serve a premise, but certainly plenty of other equally contrived dramas have worked thanks to strong character development and satisfying storylines.

Proof, however, doesn’t work, largely because the show doesn’t treat its central question with any degree of depth or thoughtfulness.

The best thing about the golden age of television is that it makes use of the ever-evolving, ever-expansive nature of the medium, going places viewers haven’t seen before and introducing themes that require much more than two hours to develop. A show that purports to explore life after death would seem tailor-made to take advantage of these recent advances. Proof instead trades on the most shallow and overused banalities in the I’ve-Been-to-Heaven-and-Lived-to-Tell-the-Tale genre.

I’m not suggesting it would need to be a biblically sound, Christian-approved show to be engaging, but it would at least need to seriously consider the claims of Christianity, the faith adhered to by many of the greatest minds of that “science” Carolyn prizes so highly. Wouldn’t a surgeon who took up this quest investigate why Joseph Lister was so confident of the destination of his eternal soul? Wouldn’t she wonder how, say, Francis Bacon or Blaise Pascal or Isaac Newton felt about the subject?

Carolyn’s stumbling interviews with patients who say they’ve seen their deceased loved ones wreathed in light and her encounters with a famed (and, naturally, handsome) psychic who claims to communicate with the dead hardly come off as diligent research. At the very least you’d think, given Carolyn’s supposed professional integrity, some serious theologians or apologists would come into play. But all early signs suggest that, ironically, to the extent Carolyn contends with Christianity at all, it will be with only the most pseudo, mystical, least scriptural elements.

It goes without saying then that there’s little hope that Proof will ever come close to even flirting with the answer to the question it poses. To quote Fox Mulder, the truth is out there. But you won’t find it in the colorful tales of people who’ve “gone into the light.” You’ll find it, to begin with, in 1 John 5:13.