My friend Steve offers an eloquent defense of Cold Case and urges that the series not be judged on the basis of one episode that may, or may not, have wandered out of bounds. I've posted his response here and on our feedback page:
My wife and I might be the only parents in America who actually have to beg our 3-year-old son to watch tv from time to time. He really doesn't know how to watch it because it's almost never on in our house. But there is one show my wife and I have watched steadily for more than three years now: Cold Case.
I was traveling recently and missed the controversial show referenced in this blog in which some renegade Christians stone a girl to death. I'll definitely need to see that one before I comment at all on it. But as a Roman Catholic, I've always found Cold Case's portrayal of religious faith, particularly Catholicism, to be sensitive, insightful and quite compelling. My wife and I watch this show largely because of its very powerful storytelling. Its characters are complex, and the show is relentless in exploring the awful capacity for evil that humans have as well as the toughness and goodness that allows us to endure horrible things and try to right them.
Religion is of course a major part of our society, so Cold Case is bound to take on themes of faith in some episodes. When it does, the depiction of religion has frankly been overwhelmingly positive. If you watch the show consistenly as I have, you learn that the police lieutenant who serves as the boss for the show's detectives has a brother who is a Catholic priest - and he's quite proud of that. During one show, when a detective suggests that a young boy might have been murdered years before by a priest, the lieutenant snaps, "Just because he's a priest doesn't mean he's a pedophile." And by the end of the show, it turns out the priest is the good guy. In other episodes, a young girl in mortal danger from her father is left by her mother in a Catholic church that takes care of her. In another show about drug trafficking, a flawed but fearless Latin American priest stands up bravely for Latino women against savage drug dealers. There are other examples along these lines, but you get the idea: Cold Case takes religious faith very seriously.
I don't know much about the background of the show's producers and writers, but my guess is that at least some of them are religious themselves. Cold Case is rich in religious symbolism, and its stories are largely about evil, love and forgiveness. It sometimes shows us things we don't want to see or think about, but it does so artfully and memorably. Even if the show went astray a bit with its recent controversial episode - and I'll need to see it first to decide - it has a long track record of being a friend of faith. And in our modern television culture, the faithful among us need all the friends we can find.
Good points, all. So, has anyone actually seen the episode that the article our post was based upon made reference to? If so, was it as bad as the article claimed? Please share your thoughts with us.
RLC