Whenever you start out a piece with “against my better judgment” you might as well follow it up with the corollary “what were you thinking?”
Such was the case a couple of days ago, I confess, when I watched the Jan. 25 premiere of Fox TV’s Lucifer. I can’t even cop a plea to being lured in the midst of spontaneous channel-switching. I was on campus working but set my personal video recorder (PVR) to make sure I could check it out, since I had first written about it here in a piece last June 9 headlined, “The Devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his pop culture due on Fox Television as Lucifer Morningstar, recently retired as Lord of Hell and running a piano bar in Los Angeles, the City of Angels”( https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/the-devil-prince-of-this-world-is-not-surprisingly-about-to-get-his-pop-culture-due-on-fox-television-as-lucifer-morningstar-recently-retired-as-lord-of-hell-and-running-a-piano-bar-in-los-angeles/)
Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the show yet. This isn’t The Exorcist, the 1973 film directed by William Friedkin and adapted and produced by William Peter Blatty from his 1971 novel of the same name. In 2016, Welsh-born actor Tom Ellis is no badass devil. He’s an amateur wannabe crime fighter helping the L.A.P.D. Really.
The basic outline for Lucifer goes something like this in the new DC Comics-based high-concept (according to Fox TV anyway) series genre. Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux.”
Admittedly the production of Lucifer is slick enough. That said, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Decker (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”
It’s actually funnier to hear in the trailer than in the premiere. Perhaps because by the time the line is uttered you have decided Lucifer works better as a trailer than a TV series. Can there be a trailer without a show or movie? If so, I’d nominate Lucifer for it.
The chemistry between Chloe Decker and Lucifer Morningstar in the premiere is somewhat less than sizzling, given her penchant not to be charmed by him, although there is some hint she’s warming up to him by the end of the show. Multiple references by Morningstar to Decker about her briefly being a B-list actress, best known for her topless scenes in a movie called Hot Tub High School, before she became a cop, like her dad, are not accompanied by flashbacks, although Neil Genzlinger in his New York Times review, described the devil in Lucifer as having the “sexist, salacious mind-set of a 14-year-old boy” when it comes to Chloe.
Of course, that was pretty much the nicest thing Genzlinger had to say about Lucifer, opening his piece with, “Even Satanists will be reaching for the remote when …
“The Devil deserves better than …
“Oh, heck, Fox’s Lucifer is so terrible that it doesn’t even warrant the effort of a clever opening line.
We Catholics get a refresher course every Easter in the dangers of glamorizing evil through the renewal of our baptismal promises when the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”
I’m not so sure Lucifer quite rises to the level of glamour and is a danger to be worried about. Then again, perhaps that’s what the Enemy wants me to believe. Who knows? Perhaps the Satan of Fox TV’s Lucifer is more to be feared for the normality (or banality) he projects than when he was portrayed as evil incarnate in The Exorcist some 43 years ago.
Tom Ellis told Variety news editor Laura Prudom earlier this month: “I come from a very religious household, growing up; my father’s a pastor, my uncle’s a pastor and my sister’s a pastor, and they’re all thrilled that I got this job and they’re able to understand what this show is, I suppose, which is a satire using the character of the devil to tell a redemption story. And that’s ultimately what this is – it’s not trying to offend anyone or throw up any big theological debate, it’s just a piece of entertainment, basically. If there’s anything at the heart of it that’s didactic or there’s a message there, then it’s maybe that people should have a little look at themselves and take responsibility for their own actions rather than put it on other people or other things, other beings.
“In the same way that Bruce Almighty had Morgan Freeman in a white suit playing God, that’s the tone in which we enter this sort of theology. It’s not out there to offend people. And if people do get offended by it, there’s lots of other things on.”
The day after its Jan. 25 premiere, Variety senior editor Rick Kissell wrote: “At 9 p.m., Lucifer opened with a hot 2.4/7 in 18-49 and 7.2 million viewers overall, placing first in its time period in 18-49 and standing as the night’s No. 2 show in the demo. It matches Rosewood as the highest-rated of eight Fox series launches this season (more than doubling Minority Report in the same hour last fall), and is the top-rated premiere on any network since the debut of CBS drama Supergirl last October. In a good sign, Lucifer held just about all of its audience from its first half-hour (2.5 in 18-49) to its second (2.4).
In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”
Spiritual warfare was what Lewis was talking about almost six and a half decades ago, just as the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians almost 2,000 years earlier had said, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
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