SOUL FOOD:

When TNT ordered a new season of its summer series “Saving Grace” you could have knocked me down with a feather from one of the wings of its “last chance” angel named Earl. From its first episode, I could not believe the show was going to fly.

Of course, the second season could turn out to be a nose-dive, as it did for CBS’s “Joan of Arcadia,” the show about a teenage girl who talked to God. And God — appearing to her in a host of human forms of every age, gender, social class and color — talked to her.

If that wasn’t ploy enough to drag God into serial TV, “Saving Grace” has upped the ante.

Like “Joan of Arcadia,” “Saving Grace” has strong actors creating characters who are dimensional and compelling. But as its star, it has Holly Hunter, whose unabridged intensity verges on hypnotic in any role.

Hunter seems to have plunged into the part of Grace Hanadarko feet first and never looked back. Which is how Grace is trying to live: in fifth gear, pedal to the floorboard lest the past should overtake her and bring her down.

She’s a top Oklahoma City major crimes detective who is (we are to believe) both passionate about her profession and hell bent on self-destruction. She lives like law and authority are meant for other people.

Before the show aired I heard some speculation that “Saving Grace” was an attempt by TNT to draw Evangelicals into its fold of viewers with some religious fare à la “Touched by an Angel” or “Highway to Heaven.” The pilot quashed that.

Browse Internet message boards, including the one on tnt.tv devoted to “Saving Grace,” and you’ll find a recurring theme among more traditional religious posters: an objection to the show’s very graphic, if simulated, sex.

Grace is inclined to get to know men, from strangers to her married partner and other co-workers, in the biblical sense.

“Why’s she looking at that guy?” my spouse asked during one show, “She’s either going to sleep with him or he’s going to wind up dead.” To our surprise, it was the latter.

Graces poses nude through her bathroom window for the (somewhat) older married man who lives next door.

She has a rebellious adolescent’s penchant for expletives and for rarely combing her hair.

She shows up for work in clothes pulled from the floor, wearing dark glasses indoors. She drinks whiskey and beer from sun up to sundown and drives sometimes while stinking drunk.

It’s after killing a man while driving, as Earl puts it, “like a drunk maniac,” that Grace entreats, “Dear God, please help me.” And Earl shows up.

He could be taken for an emeritus, tobacco-chewing rock band roadie with (when he needs to travel) luminescent wings. Forget Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Earl wears shoulder-length grungy gray hair, a black leather jacket, logo T-shirts under plaid flannel shirts and jeans. He spits the juice from his chaw into a green soda bottle he keeps stuffed in a pocket.

“Whaddaya need?” he asks Grace before making her predicament disappear, then explaining presence: “Here’s the deal. You’re headed for Hell, Grace, but God’s giving you one last chance. Sent me to help ya.”

As with “Joan of Arcadia,” we don’t get to know all that much about God in “Saving Grace.” At one point Earl tells Grace that if he answered all her questions about God there would be no need for her to have faith.

I say that’s a cop-out by the people writing his dialogue. But that’s a pebble on the mountain of reasons why the show’s religion — or some prefer to call it spirituality — irritates me.

Some of it just takes cheap shots. A Christian father is portrayed as a lunatic about to fulfill God’s prophecy that his son will not live to the age of 18.

Roman Catholics are rendered as uptight stereotypes (Grace’s brother-priest and devout sister) and child molesters (Fr. Patrick “Satan” Murphy, who is hinted to have harmed Grace). Or they have blind faith and no answers, like Rhetta, Grace’s childhood friend.

And what’s with all the focus on Catholics, anyway, in this city in the Bible Belt where they account for about 1 in 5 Christians compared to Evangelical and mainline Protestants?

Grace characterizes God as powerless, indifferent or missing in action. Otherwise, she conjectures, why is there still war and hunger? Why does one person survive while another one dies?

These are well-worn questions that have been addressed (in intelligent if complex ways) by theologians and scholars, both living and dead. But the show’s writers never let God answer Grace through Earl or anyone else.

We’re asked to believe — or at least suspend disbelief – about things just as ungrounded theologically as God showing up in the form of a cute guy or a cafeteria worker at the high school in “Joan of Arcadia.”

Earl tells Grace that God doesn’t care whether she goes to a temple, a church or a mosque, though neither Judaism nor Christianity nor Islam teach it. He leaves Hindu and Buddhist artifacts around her house.

What’s the deal with the fire and brimstone, then? If God’s a you-say-tomayto-I-say-tomahto sort (as Earl claims he is) couldn’t Grace be headed for reincarnation as good as headed for Hell?

Why does God disapprove of Grace sleeping with a married man when he’s cool with her killing a deer with her handgun to show off? Or at least that’s how it seems when Earl praises Grace, telling her, “Nice shot!”

Who is the God of an edgy angel who extols tabbouleh from Paxtibar, “a little planet a trillion, zillion miles from Earth”?

What exactly does Grace have to do to be saved? If she manages to do it, will that be the end of the show?

And if she doesn’t, how long will it be before her audience grows weary of watching her drink and swear and fornicate her way to Hell? We’re going to have to wait until next summer to find out.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.