Criticism of "God Friended Me" | Hollywood Reporter



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CBS's latest candidacy for a faith-based audience has a confusing sense of social media and religion, but in Brandan Micheal Hall and Violett Beane, she may have acceptable stars.

The readings associated with Jewish holidays offer a useful reminder that well before Joan of Arcadia and wonders and The book of DanielGod was a figure whose tendency to an elusive message was well established. Of course, God literally enumerates a wide assortment of rules and prohibitions and delivers unambiguous messages of bushes and summits, but God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test of faith and God makes Jonah celebrate in the womb. A leviathan to prove a point. According to the story, God acts in a mysterious way.

That is, using social media to recruit prophets and turning altruism into a treasure hunt in New York is not an inherently incorrect interpretation of its complicated processes. New CBS drama God has prepared me just happens to be poorly executed and a real test of at least one of my deepest spiritual beliefs, namely that nothing with Joe Morton can be so bad.

God has prepared me, created by Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, extremely friendly stars The mayor lead Brandon Micheal Hall as Miles, an atheist podcaster whose life is turned upside down when he receives a request from God for a friend on Facebook. Let's leave aside now that there are about a thousand Twitter accounts "claiming" to be God or God adjacent and that the interest of social media is to build a carefully organized personal universe in which we all play effectively against God. No, the God who is trying to become friends with Miles seems to have the ability to hijack all Miles devices and, once Miles accepts God, the ability to recommend people in need. This drives Miles first to a depressed man on the brink of suicide, then to Cara (Violett Beane), an online journalist on a click farm site with an important profile of "What's the trend? advice that she is rarely on anymore. With the help of Miles' best friend, Rakesh (Suraj Sharma), a talented hacker because he does it of course, they follow the digital thread of order to try to reach God's account.

It might be silly to criticize deus ex machina for a show that literally deals with social media, yet the pilot's build is simply an unholy disaster. It is an assortment of reactive characters that respond to an invisible force without a clear distinction between fate and chance and with no real respect for the dramatic ebb and flow of a televised episode. Yes, we could call this "normal life", but it's a drama, especially since God has prepared me aims the elegant loop of a new, connecting all the pieces, to result in a decidedly naive blend of false climates and emotional rhythms that stop the plot, delivered with resounding evidence. There were at least three different points in the pilot in which my notes read, "Wait, should not be the end of this story?" only to be followed by "Oh, that was stupid." Each beat is so fast that the pilot feels like being in a final in which all stories must be carefully connected and in which the end does not end.

The problems that kept discouraging me in the world of the show were almost all elements that should have been eliminated in the development process before even becoming pilots and forcing the director Marcos Siega to manage the program. execution of the executable. Siega makes the pilot brightly lit and pretty and waters overwhelming musical choices and usually can not fix that little problem in the driver who's supposed to make you laugh is very funny and I laughed at least one place that had to be serious .

There was no precedent on how to make a show like God has prepared me, I could confuse what's wrong here for the challenge of the single, but God my friend is basically doing the same thing as every "reluctant prophet in a modern world" tried to test the faith of a skeptical protagonist through a series of regular tests designed to help people in need at the same time that they help themselves. This is not just not new, it is biblical. More recently, you can watch the shows mentioned in my list or Kevin (probably) saved the world as recently as last season. Now, Kevin (probably) saved the world It was not perfect or, at first, all that was good. He struggled with the tone and by the time he settled into a pleasant routine, no one was watching and he was canceled. It was even better than that. God has prepared me does very little to adapt the formula to the way ordinary people use social media or religion in the modern world.

Until now, only the driver of God has prepared me has been made available to critics, and is made visible especially by the actors. Hall remains an actor who, once he has the right project, has star potential, and The flash Veteran Beane gets enough characterizations to be a sidekick, except that the series thinks she's co-responsible. The promising Sharma made me laugh with his reading of a too obvious joke line ("I found God, he is in Jersey!") And prevented me from going through the Introduction more stereotypical of his character. And Morton, playing the father of the main character, a reverend introduced by giving a sermon on God testing us, is good enough in his scene to make me hope that he joins God Squad's main characters.

I hope it will happen soon, as in the second episode, because there is nothing at all in the driver for God has prepared me it interests me to look at something else than another courtesy hour.

Actors: Brandon Micheal Hall, Violett Beane, Suraj Sharma, Javicia Leslie, Joe Morton
Creator: God
Series creators: Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt
first: Sunday at 20:30 ET / PT (CBS)

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