Wow! Cop in TV show says: "I'm not religious."
Well, naturally it was a British TV show. We can't have that sort of sacrilege here in One Nation Under Jebus, especially in an election year.
And even more sacrilege...the line of dialogue was in the second part of the "Red Riding" trilogy. Each section of that trilogy has the full title: "Red Riding - In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (1980/1983)."
As more than one critic noted, those titles are hilarious non sequiturs - no "Lord" of any sort ever pops up to help. The story lines center around a series of gruesome child murders, and the bungled hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in the "1980" episode.
The "Red Riding" is Yorkshire, as much of a character as any human. With its trash heaps, looming nuke plant, and crumbling houses under a perpetually lead-gray sky, as depicted here the place would make Rev. Bob Schuller consider suicide.
The whole series has a refreshing lack of all the cliches often seen in cop shows - not surprising since a main topic is police and political corruption. No smiling, helpful Bobbies around here - if these cops are smiling, they are probably about to throw you out of a moving vehicle or burn down your house.
And we get Sean Bean as a completely amoral and psycho real estate developer. "Of course I'm a Labour man. Those Tory c**ts don't stay bought."
I came across the trilogy by accident this weekend on cable. Watched the first one and was immediately hooked.
This is not casual TV watching. It's complex, multi-layered and demands close attention to even remotely understand what's going on.
The heavy Yorkshire accents don't help. I was amused to see that when it ran on British TV in 2009, some subtitles were added because even the British have trouble understanding that accent.
Now I want to read the novels by David Peace. Which have been described as "Charles Dickens on bad acid."
IMdb synopses below. Don't read the Wikipedia entry if you plan to watch - they give away the whole plot:
1974: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259574/
1980: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1260581/
1983: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259573/
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in the middle of having her baby in a stable outside a country Inn with no room..
And no, her atheism isn't represented positively but I think it IS represented realistically with regard to other people's reactions. I couldn't even begin to count the number of pitiful eye-rolls I've gotten from believers who found out I am not. But to be fair, at least half of those were right after I said something spectacularly outrageous about their myths.
And I think they make her socially awkward because of her super high intelligence, not her atheism. She'd be that hopelessly socially inept whether she was a believer or not.
I forgot about him because we quit watching several seasons ago - not sure why...we just missed it some and didn't miss missing it...
And technically, I wish there was magic too... 
Here in the US, in most TV series, it's almost a given that any character expressing religious doubts will be on the road to redemption by the end of the show.
Then we've had a couple of series that were blatant in-our-face Xian BS - Touched By An Anus...er, "Angel." And Highway To Heaven. Naturally both of those turkeys ran forever and are still playing in re-runs somewhere, I think.
And that's not counting stuff like EWTN (a whole channel run by the Catholic Church), plus the channels owned/dominated by Pat Robertson, the Crouch family, the gay-bashing Coral Gables Baptist Church, Rick Warren, and on and on.
As you may have seen, our TVs recently lost Rev. Bob Schuller's "Hour of Power." Which happily wasn't powerful enough to defeat bankruptcy. But that only happened after years of looting the treasury by cramming the executive board with relatives, and stiffing suppliers.