Ellen Gray: TV's better angels enter their 'Grace' period

SAVING GRACE. 10 tonight, TNT.

WHAT IF TNT's "Saving Grace" had gone with a polar bear instead of an angel that first season?

Might the collaboration between Oscar winner Holly Hunter - who stars as the hard-living Detective Grace Hanadarko - and "Grace" creator Nancy Miller have become the same kind of cultural phenomenon as ABC's "Lost"?

Probably not.

But as the offbeat cop drama from TNT enters its last season tonight, it has just nine hours to come up with something conclusive to say about the nature of good and evil and about where free will fits in.

Which is, coincidentally, the time that "Lost" (9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 6) has left to do what may amount to the same thing.

If "Lost" has angels - and there are those who theorize that behind all the physics and the flashing back, forward and sideways is a retelling of Milton's "Paradise Lost" - they've so far been angels in disguise.

That's probably a good thing for a show that wants viewers to work a little, and even better for a show that wants to be considered cool. Some of us have an easier time wrapping our minds around time travel and parallel universes than around heavenly messengers.

Those who feel comfortable with angels are generally thought to prefer the supernatural social-worker model of shows like "Touched by an Angel" and "Highway to Heaven," where God's ways generally aren't all that mysterious and manage to reveal themselves in a bit under an hour.

Hard to know what the angels on shows like that would have thought of Grace Hanadarko's scruffy guardian, Earl (Leon Rippy), whose love for his hard-living charge is obvious but whose purpose in her life so often isn't.

Tonight's episode, "Let's Talk," picks up where last summer's season finale left off. That one, you might recall, ended with Grace hurtling off the top of a 12-story building, along with a young woman (Yaani King) whom Earl had insisted she help. Both survived.

Miraculously, you might say.

Now, Grace is being hailed as the "Angel Cop," which is not the kind of label people generally apply to a woman who drinks more than she probably should and sleeps with anyone she pleases, married or not.

Turns out, too, that there's a dark side. Perhaps some balance is upset when good things happen for no good reason, or perhaps God is just being mysterious again, but something wicked's once again found its way to Oklahoma City in the wake of Grace's "miracle."

There are things that are cool about "Saving Grace," starting with the title sequence and that haunting theme by Everlast, and there are things that are plain silly, like Earl's occasional encounters with other angels, fellow travelers whose shop talk is a bit too matter-of-fact to be taken seriously.

But what I like about Miller, who earlier created Lifetime's interracial drama "Any Day Now," is that she's never seemed afraid to be uncool or to mix what TV's traditionally seen as soft - bonds between women that go deeper than shopping - with harder-edged stuff like race, sex, and, yes, spirituality.

An Oklahoma City native, she's also plunked her wild woman into the Bible Belt and given her a back story in which the 1995 federal-building bombing feels as close as Sept. 11 and resonates very personally.

Who else on TV does that?

I don't pretend to know where Grace is going in this last short season, but she and Miller haven't lost me yet. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.