Book of Daniel II

Even WaPo rakes it. I might watch tonight for the same reason I watch Tony Orlando & Dawn re-runs: out of morbid fascination.

I cannot recall a series in which a greater number of characters seemed so desperately detestable -- a series with a larger population of loathsome dolts. There ought to be a worse punishment than cancellation for a show that tries this hard to be offensive and, even at that crass task, manages to fail. . . .

"Book of Daniel" just barely merits First Amendment protection, flaunting its edginess with such wince-inducing contrivances as a teenage daughter who stuffs her teddy bears with pot, a grandma with Alzheimer's who interrupts Sunday dinner to complain that her husband is "always showing me his penis," a wife whose lesbian affair with her husband's secretary started when the husband insisted both women join him in a threesome, and an Episcopal priest who pops Vicodins like Tic-Tacs and regularly converses with the living image of Jesus Christ.

Actually, they don't so much converse as swap jokes, with Jesus being a pushover for a bad gag and much too cool a guy to be judgmental about the deplorable pack of crackpots who make up the priest's family and friends. The priest is Daniel -- Daniel Webster, by pointless coincidence -- a man who seems to be failing spectacularly as "father" at home and at the church where he presides. Incompetence is supposed to make him lovable and vulnerable; in fact, if it weren't for the fact that he's played by the sly and admirable Aidan Quinn, he would be simply insufferable.