Heralded by its forthcoming midseason series Good Christian Bitches—which airs in a much bolder universe in a parallel time slot to Good Christian Belles—it seems ABC has begun needling believers in earnest, after merely poking at them with gay people on Modern Family and haranguing them with Joy Behar jokes on The View. Now the network is currently wrapping up its buying season with two projects that seem likely to earn the easy ire of religious groups. The first, from Easy A and Friends With Benefits writer Will Gluck, is an untitled single-camera comedy about an angel who’s expelled from heaven and condemned to live in New York City, his damnation taking the form of ridiculously expensive railroad-style apartments and the gurgling black of the Stygian subway.
The second, from Prison Break creator Paul Scheuring and loud noise-maker Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, concerns a “skeptical everyman” who uncovers an epic conspiracy that sends him all around the world collecting clues to a mystery involving the Twelve Apostles in what sounds, essentially, like The Da Vinci Code: The Series, with the same potential for Christian backlash. Bet he discovers that the Twelve Apostles were just a bunch of humble guys who really loved Jesus! Anyway, that series of furious squeaks you hear are thousands of Magic Markers preparing “ABC: Always Baiting Christians” placards right now.