• Eli Stone, 10-11 Thursday, WPLG-ABC 10
It's hard to say which is more unlikely: That a corporate legal fang could be God's prophet; or that the Almighty would spread His word through visions of George Michael; or these matters could be blended into a daffily funny and affecting television show. Yet there Eli Stone is, ye skeptics; doubt it and be damned, or at least deprive yourself of the best thing to happen on TV since the writers went on strike three months ago.
Jonny Lee Miller (The Flying Scotsman, but more famously the first husband of Angelina Jolie) plays Stone, a Stanford-educated attorney who helps corporations trample the peasantry and worships his own version of the Holy Trinity: ``Armani, accessories and power.''
But in the middle of a routine case -- squashing a woman fruitlessly suing Big Pharma after a batch of bad vaccine made her child autistic, Stone starts having these visions of George Michael singing Faith. (Coulda been worse: Imagine trying to extract the theological implications of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.)
Medical investigations turn up alternative explanations: A neurologist says the visions are hallucinations brought on by an aneurysm in a section of the brain that can also trigger delusions of grandeur. A Chinese acupuncturist, on the other hand, thinks it's more likely Stone is in the thrall of a religious epiphany: ''God told Moses he'd send a prophet to every generation. Why not a lawyer?'' (Oh, let me count the ways . . .) Whether rooted in science or faith, Stone's visions soon cause him to start siding with the unwashed masses against his own clients, to the bemusement of his family and consternation of his colleagues.
Like Pushing Daisies, ABC's other experiment in magical realism, Eli Stone uses loony humor to cloak keen questions -- about law and justice, God and man, loss and redemption -- that emerge in moments of powerful poignancy. That's one reason to watch it. The other is that it's the second Hollywood project this year, after Rob Reiner's film The Bucket List, in which a cremated body is transported to the peaks of the Himalayas in a Chock Full O' Nuts coffee can.
They say God is in the details . . . but in the coffee grounds?
