Despite a previous commitment made by the network, NBC has rejected former MTV vice-president David Janollari’s “supernatural” series
Conception – a program which had the potential to offend millions of Christians.
Originally announced as a “supernatural mystery drama,”
Conception would have “tracked a modern-day immaculate conception on a large scale,” then followed the experiences of the various children and “shown how they’re destined to change the world.”
As the PTC
previously noted, the program would have been produced by David Janollari, the man behind such sexually-explicit, teen-targeted programs as MTV’s
Skins, which was so vile that the
Washington Post called it “a repugnant, irredeemably nihilistic viewing experience [and] a new frontier in phoniness and filth”;
The Hard Times of RJ Berger, an entire series about the size of a teenage boy’s genitals;
I Just Want My Pants Back, about sex-crazed twentysomethings; and several other similarly unsavory series. This is the person who NBC once – but no longer – was comfortable with producing a religiously-based drama.
Though
news sources speculate that the reason
Conception was abandoned is that its premise is too similar to the upcoming miniseries
Heroes: Reborn, an equally likely estimation is that the large amount of negative publicity surrounding the upcoming movie
Noah – to which many Christians have objected due to the movie’s deviation from Biblical sources – and the popularity of the reverent movie
Son of God convinced NBC that attempting to draw in Christians with a seemingly religious premise, and then offending them, is not the way to achieve success.
