“I am absolutely okay with those comparisons,” star Brandon Michael Hall (pictured above) told me one August afternoon at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. If he looks familiar that’s because he was the unlikely politician in last season’s The Mayor,a short-lived but critically acclaimed sitcom, and has worked steadily since graduating from Juilliard in 2015.
Wearing a pink suit, pink sneakers, an ankle bracelet and a pink tie, Hall was clearly at ease in his skin, discussing his new series -- one that tackles nothing less than the meaning of belief.
“You are not going to see a God or angels or demons,” Hall said. “The only God you will get close to meeting is on an account.” That account is a familiar one -- Facebook. Hall’s character, Miles Finer, receives a friend request from God. He deletes it. Within the pilot’s first five minutes, Miles receives five such requests. He deletes them and they instantly pop up again. His immediate suspicion is that it’s some prankster’s handiwork. Obviously, he’s wrong.
Miles may struggle with what to believe, but as the son of a preacher man he knows his Bible. He and his father, played by the always terrific Joe Morton (pictured below), are estranged. When viewers meet Morton’s Reverend Finer, he is practicing a sermon. His first words on the show are: “God is always testing us.”