YMMV / Amen

The NBC Series

• Awesome Music: The theme song is a feel good gospel-inspired tune that makes you feel as lively as Deacon Frye does in his entry into his church.
• Memetic Mutation: "I wanna be/am finally MRS. REVEREND DOCTOR RUBEN GREGORY!!!!!" This is usually combined with No Indoor Voice.
• Moral Event Horizon: Thelma feels her father crossed it after learning that he blew the $20,000 her mother left her. She relents after he explains that he did not do so selfishly or carelessly, but after some poor, ill-advised investments that didn't pan out.
• Questionable Casting: Thelma's actress, Anna Maria Horsford, playing her own mother in flashbacks initially makes sense...until you see that her on-screen father, Sherman Hemsley, continues to play himself during these flashbacks, except he's now her on-screen husband.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Eric Cohen wrote 18 episodes. Cohen is best known as co-creator and executive producer of So Little Time.
  • James R. Stein co-wrote five episodes. Stein is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of Son of the Beach.
  • Jace Richdale wrote three episodes. Richdale is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of The Oblongs.
  • Jim Geoghan also wrote three episodes. Geoghan is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
  • Scott Spencer Gordon wrote an episode. Gordon is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of City Guys.
  • Gary Dontzig and Steven Peterman also wrote an episode. Both are best known as developers and executive producers of Suddenly Susan.
  • Marco Pennette also wrote an episode. Pennette is best known as co-creator and co-executive producer of Caroline in the City.
  • Cuba Gooding Jr.. as a handyman with a crush on Thelma.
  • Halle Berry as one of Deacon Frye's love interests.
  • James Avery (aka "Uncle Phil") as Reverend Tom Crawford, something of a rival to Reverend Gregory.
• Tear Jerker: One of Ernie's few sympathetic moments occurs in a flashback in which he struggles to explain to a very young Thelma that her mother is never coming back.
  • When counseling a suicidal young man despondent over his father's death, he confides, "I miss my wife every day."

The German/French Film

• Complete Monster: "The Doctor" is a high-ranking SS officer, introduced personally selecting German patients at mental asylums to be killed, smiling at his oblivious victims—many of them children—before sending them away to be gassed. The Doctor enthusiastically takes part in the planning and execution of The Holocaust, eventually taking up a position in a death camp. When the Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana protests the Pope's decision to stay silent about the mass murder of Jews by allowing himself to be taken to the camp, the Doctor notes that he'll be the one to "decide who is a Jew", before forcing Father Fontana to work in the crematoria to break his spirit. Rogue SS officer Kurt Gerstein tries to secure the priest's release by falsifying papers from Heinrich Himmler, but the Doctor instead has Fontana killed and orders Gerstein's arrest.
• Nightmare Fuel: What, exactly, did Gerstein see through the peep-hole?... Just seconds before all inside were dead?
• Retroactive Recognition: Ulrich Mühe, the SS Doctor, appeared a few years later as the Villain Protagonist of The Lives of Others. Interestingly, in that movie he and Ulrich Tukur basically switch roles, with the former becoming The Atoner who expresses his Rage Within the Machine and gets punished for it, and the latter as an unapologetic hardliner of the regime who ends up a Karma Houdini. And Sebastian Koch, also from the aforementioned Lives of the Others, was there too (and played a more honorable German officer in Black Book some years later).
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: There's really no point in caring about what happens since we know that the Holocaust is going to happen anyway despite Gerstein's efforts, while he undergo a painful Trauma Conga Line until he is Driven to Suicide after being branded a war criminal by the Allies and the majority of the characters (including most of the Vatican) turned a blind eye to the incoming infamous atrocity.

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