Angels & the Divine

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is the reason half the angel stories told in English share the same structure: a life in crisis, an otherworldly guide, a revelation, a return. Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) is deliberately small, a third-class angel who still needs to earn his wings, and the film's emotional power comes from pairing the smallest possible celestial being with the largest possible human question. What the film understands that its imitators often don't is that the angel's real function is not to solve anything. He holds a mirror. George Bailey does his own saving. That distinction is the difference between a grace story and a patronizing one.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens is funnier than it looks like it has any right to be, and that is because the comedy is theologically honest. Aziraphale and Crowley are not parodies of angels and demons: they are what angels and demons might genuinely become after spending six thousand years on Earth, growing fond of bookshops and good wine. The joke is not that heaven and hell are absurd. The joke is that they are recognizable: bureaucratic, territorial, more interested in winning than in the thing they're supposedly fighting over. The Amazon adaptation found the right register, gentle and sharp at once, and Michael Sheen and David Tennant are perfectly cast. The second season was more uncertain, but the first remains the best television comedy ever made about the Antichrist.

Before the angel story became ironic and complicated, American network television offered it sincerely, and it worked. Highway to Heaven (1984) ran for five seasons with Michael Landon as a probationary angel completing earthly assignments. Touched by an Angel (1994) drew tens of millions of viewers every week with its belief that angelic contact was available to ordinary people in ordinary trouble. Joan of Arcadia (2003) brought God directly into a teenage girl's life via strangers on the bus, avoiding every expected cliche about what divine contact looks like. These shows are unfashionable now but they remain a distinct and serious tradition, one that treated the audience's capacity for belief as something to respect rather than dismantle.

Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion names its monsters Angels, and it means it. They are not metaphors: they are genuinely other, visitors from outside the order of things, each designed with a different body-logic and a different way of wanting to end the world. Anno borrowed the terminology of Judeo-Christian angelology and ran it through a broken-teenager psychology, and the result is the only work in this guide that uses the angelic concept to ask what it would feel like to be visited by something genuinely incomprehensible, with no good news attached. The show's collapse into abstraction in its final episodes was a budget problem and a nervous breakdown both at once, and it remains unresolved. That is part of why it persists.