The Book of Daniel

. . . but not the one in the Bible.

When this show first came out there were calls to boycott it, and I e-mailed my local NBC affiliate to support their decision to go ahead and air the show. I saw the first episode, and truly was not impressed with the show. There was no reason to boycott it, but I saw little reason to believe I’d enjoy it either.

This week my wife and I got the DVD via Netflix, and watched the rest of the show. Through the first DVD my impression remained the same, but with the second DVD of the set the program actually improved. The final two episodes, which deal with Daniel’s son Peter getting beaten up because he is gay, and also look back to the death of son Jimmy from leukemia are really good. Having experienced the death of a child from cancer, I have a hard time watching such episodes, but the script had the right questions and many fo the right answers, or more precisely lack of answers, with which parents and other family members deal in such situations.

I think the failing of the show was still the introduction of two many sources of conflict at once, overloading the viewer, but as the show focused more and more on a smaller set of problems it got much better. I suspect that by the time a new show reaches its sixth episodes it has already lost most of its viewers.

In any case, the show was cancelled with no mourning from me at the time, but now that I’ve seen the entire series, my impression is much more favorable. I recommend taking a look at these DVDs.