Call me old-fashioned, but I blush to see a priest in running pants. There's so few of them these days, after all, the least they can do is identify themselves. Once those cord-dangling cotton sweats start swinging in the breeze, memories of Linford Christie at his fastest (replayed in slow motion) snarl up the message, the mind wanders and you're hard put to remember you're watching the first episode of RTE's new buy-in from the US, a 22-week marathon called Nothing Sacred.
Nothing Sacred is the Roman Catholic Church's last chance to impress itself on popular culture. Absolutely the last chance, because it's made by Twentieth Century Fox and paid for by the big ABC network. If you don't make it there, well, you know the rest. It's the kind of opportunity Carmelite nuns spent years praying for - huge exposure, a sympathetic hero and the prospect of putting bums on seats for Jesus.
Now, Father Ray is no Linford Christie. For a start, he's white, like everyone else in the first episode, bar a few albino Latin-Americans crowding round a Christening font. RTE might not notice this - Donnybrook being rather a pale place - but with a location in downtown Los Angeles, the sheer whiteness of Nothing Sacred's cast is quite remarkable, if a mitre off-colour in the spiritual symbolism stakes. Ray single-handedly fights church authorities, a greedy property developer and some sneaky Catholic fundamentalists, while keeping himself spiritually fit by running every morning around his derelict, inner-city parish. Homeless folk sleep on the church steps, angel choruses sing discreetly whenever his kindness reaches sentiment saturation point. Often, as it happens.
Barely blinking for the ad breaks, the endearing Ray finds himself confronted by Gemma, an ex-girlfriend with who he used to read the Bible at divinity college. Gemma's teenage stepson is bent on the usual dreaded course of self-destruction because of his failed relationship with her controlling, manipulative husband who, by the way, hasn't touched her for ages. Of all the sin joints in all the world, she had to walk into his, and at a time when a pregnant girl from fundamentalist stock thinking of having an abortion has taped his advice to her in the confessional and is threatening to expose him to the Bishop. They meet in a bedroom of the wonderfully-pagan Valhalla Hotel where Gemma worries about stretch marks while Ray wrestles with his vows. Figure the rest out if you dare.
And that's but a few of the first episode's plot teasers, which come at you fast as tennis balls spat by an automatic machine. Plot so dominates this series - producer-driven drama, with writers tagging on - that everything else is sacrificed as a result. Characters don't grow out of lines, they flop around wearing "guess who I am" badges, and you never guess wrong. There's the nun who has reportedly hit the "stained glass ceiling" (now at ankle level), the atheist parish accountant, the older priest wizened by a lifetime of spiritual crises, the sensitive young curate pigged out on idealism.
Think Cracker, think Murder One and you start to realise what so topical a series could achieve, with writer-dominance and a love of complex character. Then, Father Ray could become the last of the cowboys, a rugged maverick in that great western genre which single-handedly defined American male individualism from Jesse James through Hemingway and Steinbeck down to Cormac McCarthy, making this inner-city parish the final frontier where one man's faith faces the ultimate showdown. Dream on. In Nothing Sacred, Ray as Gary Cooper striding alone at High Noon, or conquering cynicism without losing his innocence in Mr Deeds Goes To Town, becomes instead a dumbed-down medley with spiritual politics so saccharine they make "Have a nice day" sound like the First Commandment.
Good intentions are never enough. Even if Nothing Sacred will, as reported, eventually tackle all those gritty issues which make church-watching a cultural must these days, that still won't make it good telly, no matter what its topicality and despite its missionary zeal. US bishops are apparently at loggerheads about it, but then bishops do get excited about the strangest subjects.
Things might improve. The nun may spike the stereotypes by nearly having an affair too, the atheist could become a healer. Straining for some critical charity, let me note the programme's comfortable feel, its sense of a familiarity born as much from its Cheers-style parish office as from the low-key bonding of countless buddy movies. But even with some mildly tasty Jesuitical touches - a running Aquinas gag, the news that performing baptisms is the clerical equivalent of drawing the short straw - Nothing Sacred is a cop-out.
Nothing Sacred is on RTE 1 on Wednesdays at 10.10 p.m.