Season 1 title card
Miracle Workers is a 2019 TBS anthology series based on the writings of Simon Rich starring Daniel Radcliffe, Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Lolly Adefope (Season 1 and 2), Jon Bass, and Steve Buscemi.
The stories are:
- Miracle Workers (Season One), God (Buscemi) is in a funk, having come to the realization that Earth has turned into a terrible place and that it's all become too much to handle. Deciding that his creation is a lost cause, God announces that he's going to blow it all up and pursue other ventures. It's up to Craig (Radcliffe) and Eliza (Viswanathan), low-level angels responsible for answering humanity's prayers, to convince God to give Earth one more chance by answering one impossible prayer within two weeks.
- Miracle Workers: Dark Ages—Prince Chauncley (Radcliffe) is struggling to live up to his tough father's expectations. Meanwhile, Alexandra "Al" Shitshoveler (Viswanathan) pursues an education in the hope of not becoming a dung-shoveler like her father (Buscemi). Inevitably, the two meet and have a common realization: it's quite a challenge to defy expectations and not follow in your parents' footsteps. And sometimes, a change like that is needed to add some light in the dark ages. While the first season had a central story arc, Season 2 is episodic in nature.
- Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail—the Reverend Ezekiel Brown (Radcliffe) is the pastor of a grim, dusty prairie town in the American West in 1844. With his parishioners dying of cholera and the harvest having failed again, Rev. Brown hits on an idea: go to Oregon! Rev. Brown needs a guide to take the village to Oregon, and who should show up but "Jim Nobody" (Buscemi), a grimy frontiersman who volunteers to take them—except that he is really Benny the Teen, notorious bank robber and wanted criminal. Viswanathan is Prudence Aberdeen, photographer hobbyist and housewife stuck in an unfulfilling marriage.
- Miracle Workers: End Times—Sid (Radcliffe) is a road warrior in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is actually called The Wasteland. He meets Freya (Viswanathan), a ferocious warlord, and they fall in love and marry. They wind up settling in "the suburbs", aka the only inhabited village within a thousand miles. Sid goes to work for Morris, a junk dealer (Buscemi).
The series was cancelled in 2023 after four installments.
Miracle Workers provides examples of the following:
- Artifact Title: The seasons after the first are still called Miracle Workers despite not involving the divine or supernatural at all. (In the first season, Radcliffe and Viswanathan's characters were literal miracle workers in Heaven.)
- Black Vikings: In seasons 2 and 3 especially, when the show adopts nominally historical settings. You would be hard-pressed to find a woman of Indian ethnicity as a common peasant in either medieval Europe or the Oregon Trail, but there she is anyway.
- Butt-Monkey: No matter the setting, Daniel Radcliffe always plays the beleaguered central character who's put down by nearly everyone else around him.
- Genre Anthology: A comedy anthology, in which the same core cast of actors (Buscemi, Radcliffe, Viswanathan, Soni, Jon Bass) play different characters in different settings, one per season.
- Official Couple: They play different characters each time, but every season involves Radcliffe's and Viswananthan's couples pairing up.
- Universal-Adaptor Cast: The core cast is the same for every season, although the roles they play have no connections, and rarely even similar personality traits; for example, Buscemi plays an incompetent God in Miracle Workers, a well-meaning but old-fashioned father in Dark Ages, an unrepentant criminal that's loyal to his friends in Oregon Trail, and a sleazy, bigoted junk trader in End Times.
