Minor Thoughts from me to you

I've enjoyed most of the TV shows that Tim Minear has worked on -- Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, and Drive. Unfortunately, three of those four were canceled after 13 episodes or less. Fortunately, Tim Minear gets another chance.

"Miracle" -- from 20th Century Fox TV, where Minear and Holland are based with overall deals -- centers on a disgraced former televangelist, a man of no faith, who finds that God is using him to perform real miracles and change lives, starting with his own.

"It's about losing everything and starting over and finding that there is a higher purpose in life," Minear said. "It's about a man who says, 'I don't know how to be good, but I'll try to be better.' "

Televangelism is a familiar territory for Minear, who had an evangelical upbringing in Whittier, Calif., and went to evangelical schools. His father is a radio engineer for religious programming. While he was growing up, Minear often listened to preachers as they taped their programs in his dad's home studio.

"Miracle" also was influenced by the series of sex and accounting fraud scandals that rocked the televangelist industry in the 1980s and brought disgrace to such heavyweights as Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Others, like Peter Popoff, were exposed as a sham.

But "Miracle" "is not in any way an indictment to religion," Minear said. "It's a love letter to the religious."

What attracted him to the idea of doing a show about a disgraced televangelist was that "I love the genre, and I love stories about redemption and stories about characters that are slightly cynical and nudged by higher force," Minear said.

I'm already looking forward to it.