Don’t worry, America, you’re old enough to watch “The Book of Daniel,” NBC’s new weekly drama about a well-connected Episcopal priest, his family and his bailiwick. Ten days ago media newscasts were reporting that the show had come under attack in advance, largely by people who could not yet have watched it but were amplifying the views of ideologues. (Remember “The Last Temptation”? Remember “Dogma”?) So, my wife and I stayed up and watched the opening double episode.

I judge that neither the Church Universal, nor the Episcopal Church, will be caused much new trouble by the series – mm … the bishops don’t come off very well, so far. Here’s a measured reaction from a retired ordained minister in the Protestant mainline.

Those early reactions in the press point up the most obvious feature of the show: in terms of the sheer number of characters at or near crisis with destructive issues, “The Book of Daniel” is over the top! Daniel Webster, the rector of a heavyweight New York-area parish, overuses painkillers with codeine. His wife Judith is way too fond of martinis.

Of their four children, one son is dead of leukemia, the eldest survivor Peter is gay, his adoptive brother Adam (Sino-American) is cutting a swath through his town’s population of high school girls (including the daughter of the parish’s senior warden and his openly racist wife), and little sister Grace has just been arrested for selling pot to support her interest and considerable talent in digital animation.

The rector’s sister-in-law Victoria is married to Charlie who seems to be the church’s asset manager. Charlie has just run off with his secretary – and with $3.2 million in church funds intended for construction of a new school; previously, we’re to learn, these three have been involved in a m?nage-?-trois. The rector’s father Bertram is a bishop of the diocese; his wife Kate has Alzheimer’s, and he is shortly found to be in a relationship with a second bishop, Beatrice Congreve, currently unmarried. The town’s Catholic priest, Father Frank, is Mafia-linked.

Now, after 30 years in parish ministry, I’ll quickly agree that trouble is more prevalent in a congregation than usually is realized or acknowledged. In one congregation I served, a program we used to train members for lay care-giving roles required a survey of the membership to determine how many were in momentary or chronic difficulty. We were stunned to learn that, in the lives of one in four members, something serious enough was going on that having someone in whom to confide would be a benefit. Twenty-five percent. But in “The Book of Daniel” the figure approaches 100 percent, and the almost total absence of any reasonably stable folks seems unrealistic. Or, the gist of the series may be: “what if” a family made up entirely of out-of-control folks landed in a church rectory and in some key leadership positions? As I say, it’s over the top.

Despite these improbabilities, I could not finally fight off the nagging feeling that this family will prove to be loving and committed. Trust is required for people to fight as often and as hard as they do and still stick around, and the series actually points up something I believe: clergy families are more candid about the realities of human life than most other folks. The idea that the Websters are “dysfunctional” floated in from the religious media; it might not apply. I enjoyed the program more than its advance

press coverage and its opening scenes led me to think I would.

Turning from its wheels-off cast of characters, however, viewers might plausibly wonder how the series fares as a theological statement. In fact it stumbles and nearly falls in the first few minutes. Daniel and Judith bring their daughter home from the police station in the early hours of Sunday and are soon in church, where we hear Daniel struggling in his sermon with the human tendency to give in to temptation.

Perhaps, he speculates, temptation isn’t as bad as we say it is. For if we didn’t give in to it, make mistakes and commit sin, how could there be redemption? This is the ancient doctrine known as felix culpa, and there is gold to be mined from it – but not easily or quickly.

Knowing we’re implicated in evil, by grace we can recover, stronger than we were before…. Sometimes…. But it is early in the show when this comes up; the rector may be hoping to give his daughter (who is present) a little breathing room (she has taken a terrible drubbing in the car from her mother), and Bishop Congreve (also present for a routine sermon critique) rightly calls him on it. We can’t tell, at this point, whether he deeply believes in “the fortunate fall,” or is trying to get himself off the hook.

Theology fared better in the show, it seemed to me, when Jesus was around. Yes, as you’ve probably heard, or seen in the promos, Jesus regularly is present with Daniel. It was thought to be a potential problem that the actor in the role of Jesus recently played a homicidal maniac. Here he’s wearing a garment somewhere between Palestinian attire and a white cassock, and he is put forward as the kind exponent of theology’s modest claims. Does your being with me mean that I’ve in some way been “chosen,” Daniel wonders. No, Jesus says, I’m available in this way to anyone. Few mention it, Daniel notes. Few hear me, Jesus explains.

A nice bit of dialogue? Sister-in-law Victoria and her husband’s secretary Jessie Gilmore (they’ve momentarily patched it up) arrive, late, for Sunday dinner at the rectory. Bertram is present, and Victoria urges the bishop, upon being introduced to Jessie, please not to attack her friend with any of his famous jokes. “She’s

a Methodist,” she explains. “I don’t tell Methodist jokes,” the bishop objects. Jessie Gilmore (who seems to have stepped straight from the soaps into this series) lowers her eyes, smiles devastatingly and purrs: “I don’t think there are any!”

I wish I could say with certainty what the point of NBC’s series is or will be. I don’t have an inside track. But I fear it unsettles those among my Christian sisters and brothers who have been critical of “The Book of Daniel” that a show – particularly one handling religious matter-should fail to head off immediately in a direction that is recognizably “Christian.” Who knows, though? There may be discoveries. The

show, which registered with me as dark comedy, is impeccably and cleverly produced.

The cast is stellar. The plot is – well, over the top, but then … it airs at 10 in the evening.

The Rev. George C. Bland Jr. is a retired minister in the United Church of Christ. He lives in Castine.