WHAT WOULD WOODERSON DO?

NEW YORK - Two television stations are refusing to broadcast a new totally unrealistic NBC series about an Episcopal priest who abuses painkillers, has a gay son, a promiscuous straight son, a daughter who deals marijuana, and a wife who drinks too much.

Conservative Christian groups, with nothing better to do now that the "those nasty liberals are trying to steal our Christmas" fracas is over, have condemned the depiction of Jesus as blasphemous, accusing the writers of portraying Christ as tolerant of sin in talks with the priest. As everyone knows, Christianity is hardly the religion of tolerance, and Conservative Christian groups are up in arms over such a depiction.

NBC affiliates KARK in Little Rock, Ark., and WTWO in Terre Haute, Ind., said sensitivity to losing a lot of fucking money led them not to air "The Book of Daniel," which debuts Friday. In Little Rock, the WB affiliate, which has nothing to lose anyway, has arranged to show the drama instead.

"If my action causes people in our community to pay more attention to my phony baloney, self-serving philosophy, I have accomplished my mission," Duane Lammers, WTWO's general manager, said in a statement on his station's Web site.

The series stars Aidan Quinn as the Rev. Daniel Webster, a literary allusion no one will get, who discusses his many troubles in regular chats with a robe-wearing, bearded, longhaired, obviously potsmoking Jesus (played by Matthew McConaughey, in a reprisal of his role from Dazed and Confused). The American Family Association, in Tupelo, Miss., and Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs group led by James Dobson, are asking supporters to lobby their local NBC affiliate to drop the show.
The American Family Association said the series was another sign of NBC's "anti-Christian, pro-homo bigotry." Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, an anti-defamation group, called the series the "work of an embittered ex-Catholic homosexual."
Bob Waliszewski, of Focus on the Family's teen ministries, said the show portrayed Christ as a "namby-pamby frat boy who basically winks at every sin and perversity under the sun. We must show America that true Christians hide and deny their involvement in sin and perversity. Winking is completely unexceptable. Jesus would never wink. Well, maybe he'd wink a little bit. But he'd never listen to ZZ Top!"

"When the pastor's teen son is sexually active and having many romps with his 15-year-old girlfriend, this Jesus says, `A kid has to be a kid,'" Waliszewski said. "I don't think NBC would have portrayed a Muslim cleric or a Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama, in a show this way. Why? Because they know Muslims and Buddhists don't pay any attention to such trivial bullshit. But Christians are all about trivial bullshit, my friend!"

NBC expects concern over this issue to build to a crescendo, spark marginal interest in the series itself, and finally to be relegated to rednecks fighting with each other on talk radio.