Last night, we finished watching the NBC five season TV series “Highway to Heaven.” It’s a highly recommended family show focusing more on spirituality than religion. I had previously seen many individual episodes but I’m now a bigger fan after evening watching from start to finish over the past two months. The last episode finished in 1989 and is currently available for streaming including on Netflix which provides the tagline: “Under God's direction, angel Jonathan and ex-cop Mark help troubled souls overcome adversity and embrace honesty, kindness and forgiveness.”
Major themes in the series involved 1) the healing beauty of nature, like in the final two episodes of Season 1 called “Thoroughbreds” with 24-year old Helen Hunt, 2) overcoming and accepting illnesses, disabilities, ageism (youth and elderly), parenting, education, victims of war, death and dying and 3) environmental causes such as in season 2 episode 9 called “Birds of a Feather.” Spoiler alert: Jonathan wears a bird costume and dies trying to protect kids and parents working at a factory that’s polluting the environment.
Watching the final show last night, I wondered if the provocative episode caused the series to get cancelled as they really pushed some huge corporate and political buttons extremely relevant then and today! In “Merry Christmas from Grandpa,” Jonathan warns a tycoon building a nuclear power plant how an accident could destroy his grandchildren and a farmer using to many chemicals polluting drinking water including fertilizers and Malathion (the Latin word for bad or evil is Mal and the pesticide is widely used in agriculture, residential landscaping, public recreation areas, including killing mosquitoes). Going up against the nuclear and chemical industries for the final episode was not enough so the angel also appears in the White House at the bed of President George Bush (a look-alike actor) and the First Lady that his future children to great, great, great grandchildren will disappear if he does not take a stand to protect the environment! Looking back on the life of George Bush, as I did in a blog in December 2018, he was relatively a great environmentalist especially compared to many current disgraceful world leaders.
Well this last episode did not get the show cancelled but apparently it was a combination of lower ratings and the actor Victor French, who played Mark, sadly died at age 54 of lung cancer from smoking.