The first season of Miracle Workers by TBS, released in 2019. It is an adaptation of Simon Rich's novel What in God's Name.
God (Steve Buscemi), CEO of Heaven, Inc. has grown bored and disillusioned with Earth. His days are spent bumbling around at the expense of his high-level assistants Sanjay (Karan Soni) and Rosie (Lolly Adefope). When God decides to blow up his creation and everything in it, a plucky employee from the department responsible for answering prayers, Eliza Hunter (Geraldine Viswanathan), makes a bet with him: if she and her partner, Craig (Daniel Radcliffe), can answer one impossible prayer from a human, God will not blow up the world. Eliza and Craig choose to make two painfully awkward people, Sam (Jon Bass) and Laura (Sasha Compere) fall in love...but this is harder than it looks.
Initially pitched as a standalone adaptation, the show became an anthology series centered around Rich's writings. The followup, Miracle Workers: Dark Ages, was released in 2020.
Tropes in this season:
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: Eliza bets God that she and Craig can answer one impossible prayer in exchange for giving Earth a reprieve from fiery destruction. If Eliza loses, God blows the Earth up and she has to eat a worm in front of her co-workers.
- Adaptation Personality Change: In the book both angels were optimistic, while in the series Craig is pessimistic and cynical.
- Big Damn Kiss: Laura and Sam at the last possible second.
- Black Sheep: "1 Day" reveals that God is this for his family. His big sister rules over a planetwide utopia, while his big brother has almost beaten their mother's record for "longest period without a war".
- Bolt of Divine Retribution: God isn't very bright and has no subtlety so his solution to any obstacle in governing Earth is throwing down lightning bolts or some other terrifying weather phenomenon.
- Both Sides Have a Point:
- Eliza and Sanjay are risk-takers compared to Craig. Craig's cautionary approach reduces potential consequences, but means that larger problems aren't solved. Meanwhile, Eliza and Sanjay have a higher rate of return when they have a success, but more splendid disasters because of multiple mitigating factors. By the end of the show, Craig agrees that sometimes you have to take risks and pay the consequences, while Eliza admits that sometimes the cautionary route is the best one.
- God and his siblings nearly come to blows over this. His older brother and sister aptly point out he's a Spoiled Brat who hasn't put in proper effort or thought into his worlds because their parents will always foot the bill. When God regains his spirit, he points out that his world is messed up because unlike his brother and sister, he believes in giving others free will.
- British Brevity: As a limited series, the show was originally supposed to consist of a single season of seven episodes.
- Butterfly of Doom: Part of the problem with divine intervention is that doing something to benefit one person can often have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences; notably, when Eliza answers a Mexican farmer's prayer for rain by shifting weather patterns, she ends up causing a devastating typhoon in Asia.
- Celestial Bureaucracy:
- God's angels work for Heaven Inc. and go about conducting celestial business as if they were mundane blue collar and white-collar workers.
- Earth and Heaven are just a part of a grand cosmos, with other planets and galaxies being run like businesses by other deities.
- Clueless Boss: God is almost helpless without Sanjay around to do everything for him.
- Comically Small Demand: If God wins the bet, apart from going through with blowing up the Earth, Eliza has to eat a worm in front of her co-workers.
- Disproportionate Retribution: While God can be nice and merciful to his employees, the humans on Earth are not as lucky.
- On a whim, God tries to get Sanjay to make Bill Maher's penis explode because he doesn't like it when he mocks him.
- When God's newest prophet Dave Shelby tries ignoring him, waving him off as some psychotic break he's having, God has Craig destroy his house with a localized twister. When Dave tries rejecting him in a "It's Not You, It's Me" situation, God agrees and then tries to have Craig kill him.
- The Dog Bites Back: Sanjay has been God's Beleaguered Assistant, carrying out inane tasks for him. Craig humiliating him becomes a wakeup call to Sanjay when Craig apologizes and asks sincerely for his help in the Answered Prayers department. Sanjay admits that he missed being in Answered Prayers and politely refuses to go back upstairs when God struggles with filling the void.
- Failed a Spot Check: One of Craig's earliest attempts to get Laura and Sam together is to "send them a sign", but Eliza points out that this has never worked, finding footage of Abraham Lincoln passing by multiple crows and a black cat on his way to the theater he's historically killed in.
- Foil: Craig to Sanjay. They both worked in Answered Prayers and try a stint of being God's right-hand man. The difference is that Sanjay was a risk-taker and someone who carried out God's orders without questioning them, including killing Bill Maher. When God orders Craig to kill his new "prophet" Dave for refusing him, Craig "accidentally" destroys the necessary equipment and runs back downstairs.
- For Want Of A Nail: Answering prayers is a painstaking task, with even the most minute mistakes kicking off major earthly disasters. Even a successfully answered prayer can have unintended consequences, such as answering a prayer for a lost glove, only for the person praying to turn out to be an armed robber who needed the glove to go on a violent crime spree.
- God Is Inept: The show depicts God as a well-meaning but bumbling Jaded Washout and Manchild who's seriously considering destroying Earth after it failed to turn out how he hoped. It's later revealed that he's the Black Sheep of his divine family and that his siblings have all created utopias with their own worlds. Played with, as it also turns out that Earth failed to work because he’s the only deity to give his creations free will and lives of their own. When the chips are down, God stands up to his family and refuses to let Earth die because even if it isn’t what he expected, he still loves it.
- Groin Attack: In the second episode, God tasks Sanjay with engineering a way to make Bill Maher's penis explode.
- Heroic BSoD: God is despondent at seeing just how much trouble Earth and its denizens are in and he's isolated himself from the rest of heaven and spends his time drinking and moping.
- Hollow World: According to God's sister he forgot to build a middle into his world so humans are forced to live only on the surface because the inside is all fire.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All the episodes are named after the time remaining before the world-ending bomb erupts.
- Impossible Task: A large portion of humanity's prayers are immediately labelled as being impossible to answer because there are too many variables to try and control. Some of the worst are love prayers, one of which Craig and Eliza have to successfully answer in two weeks or else God blows the Earth up.
- Jade-Colored Glasses: Craig is worn down after millennia of dealing with a never-ending deluge of prayers from humanity, most of them impossible to answer. He's managed to carve out a small bit of satisfaction by answering a handful of small-scale prayers each day.
- Kick the Dog: When Craig finds out that Sanjay has been helping wipe God's ass, he immediately gets it on camera to further the humiliation. He does apologize, after, because he knows that was a mean thing to do.
- Meaningful Name: In press materials, the main characters' surnames are listed as Craig Bog, Eliza Hunter, and Sanjay Prince. In their former lives, Craig was a bog guardian, Eliza was a warrior, and Sanjay was royalty.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- The protagonists leave a swath of death and destruction in their wake as they try to win their bet against God. Justified, as they only have two weeks to win, otherwise God will blow up the Earth and bring about even more death and destruction.
- Sanjay, Eliza, and Rosie's idea of getting Sam and Laura on the kiss cam at a basketball game results in Sam and Laura freezing up, the mascot getting involved and putting even more pressure on them, and the date ending in disaster after the mascot dies because Eliza tries to defuse the pressure by making his appendix burst.
- Turns out that God's not much better, with the whole situation being his fault in the first place because he put no thought or care into his initial design and was apathetic in maintaining it.
- No Hero to His Valet: While Sanjay relishes the status he gets from being God's right-hand angel, he knows better than anyone that God is a complete wreck who is helpless on his own.
- Not So Omniscient After All: A Running Gag has his employees think that God is playing some masterful, carefully constructed plan to impart wisdom onto those in his employ (both in a "grand scheme" and personal level), when really he's an Almighty Idiot who makes it up as he goes. He doesn't even hide the fact that he doesn't plan anything.
- Oh, Crap!: At the end of the fourth episode, the team finds out that Sam's beloved grandmother is due to die in two days.
- Older Than They Look:
- Craig, Eliza, and Sanjay all look like they're barely out of college, but they all lived and died hundreds of years ago.
- God's older siblings both look younger than him. His sister looks like a child.
- Only Sane Man: Craig's caution makes him this. While Eliza, Sanjay, and Rosie are prepared to go to drastic measures to achieve their goals, Craig advocates caution and avoiding as much collateral damage as possible.
- The Peter Principle: Sanjay's situation evokes this somewhat. He was so good at answering prayers he got promoted to God's babysitter and spends all day solving the stupidest problems imaginable.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: In their quest to bring two people together, Craig and Eliza cause a great deal of havoc, including rupturing some poor guy's appendix, destroying a major airport in China, and crashing an oil tanker into the Galapagos Islands. Justified, as they only have two weeks to win, otherwise God will blow up the Earth and bring about even more death and destruction.
- Race Against the Clock: Craig and Eliza have only two weeks to save Earth from destruction.
- Ruptured Appendix: The angels usually turn to bursting people's appendixes when they're panicking and out of options. They become even more panicked if their target has already had their appendix removed.
- Skewed Priorities: God thinks that Eliza will care more about the fact that she'll be forced to eat a worm in front of her coworkers than about the fact that her losing the bet will cause an apocalypse. Her expression screams You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!. In fact, Craig puts the bigger priority in perspective: if the world ends because of Eliza, she will go down as the biggest mass murderer in divine history.
- Snipe Hunt: In his former life, Craig was a caveman whose job was to keep watch for the "bog monster". As he thinks about it, it occurs to him that there probably never was a bog monster and the villagers just wanted to get rid of him.
- Technician Versus Performer: Craig and Sanjay have a rivalry based on their approaches to miracles. Craig prefers tiny, carefully-engineered miracles that make as few waves as possible. Sanjay is more willing to take risks in order to create big miracles.
- This Explains So Much: Sanjay says this when he hears another say that God can't read.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Eliza has pure intentions, but she causes more trouble by trying to help. In the first episode alone, she accidentally inflicts deadly typhoons while trying to answer a farmer's prayer for rain, which snowballs into her giving God the idea to blow the Earth up.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Eliza comes to the Answered Prayers Department thinking that she can really make a difference. Craig quickly disabuses her of that notion.
- White Sheep: God might not have created a perfect utopia like the rest of his family, but that's because he's the only member of his family that gave his creations free will.
