Miracles (TV series)

Did You Know?

• Shout! Factory released the entire series on DVD on April 19, 2005, featuring six commentary tracks, five deleted scenes, a 30-minute interview with series creator Richard Hatem, and a rough cut of a series promo.
• As of 2025, the international rights to the series are held by Multicom Entertainment Group, while U.S. rights are still held by Disney Enterprises Inc.
• Fans wrote messages on napkins and mailed them to various networks hoping the show would be revived by another broadcaster, but efforts were unsuccessful.

Plot

The show starts with Paul Callan, a Catholic Church investigator in Boston who debunks supposed miracles and feels bad about letting believers down. His mentor, Father Poppi, suggests a break. Months later, while doing charity work in Arizona, Paul gets a call from Poppi to check out a boy in Cottonwood named Tommy Ferguson who can supposedly heal people. Paul witnesses a real miracle: Tommy heals others, but each time his own rare disease gets worse. After a car crash nearly kills Paul, Tommy uses his power one last time to save him, dying in the process. Before that, Paul’s blood spells out “God is Now Here” on the broken windshield. Feeling his faith restored, Paul goes back to the Church, but the Monsignor rejects his report for lack of proof. Frustrated, Paul quits and learns Poppi never actually called him about Tommy. Later, a man named Alva Keel approaches Paul in a diner and offers him a job with his group, Sodalitas Quaerito. Keel explains that Paul’s blood-writing event, called hemography, is part of a big, dark coming event. The same miracle appeared to six other people over the past 25 years, but each time the message read “God is Nowhere.” Paul joins Keel and former police officer Evelyn Santos to investigate the paranormal and find a way to stop the approaching darkness.

Cast

Skeet Ulrich plays Paul Callan, who used to investigate modern miracles for the Catholic Church. He became an orphan very young: his mother died from an unknown illness when he was five, and he never knew his biological father. At age seven, Paul spent two weeks in St. Jerome's Hospital fighting pneumonia, which nearly killed him. He quit the church after a monsignor rejected his report on the Tommy Ferguson case. After that, he joined forces with Alva Keel and Evelyn Santos, working for an organization called Sodalitas Quaerito. Angus Macfadyen portrays Alva Keel, once a professor at Harvard. While studying linguistics at Cambridge University, he worked on a senior project recording bird calls. When he played the tapes back, he heard his dead mother’s voice among the bird sounds, repeating a childhood nickname. In 1998, he started Sodalitas Quaerito, a small business that looks into and records supposed supernatural events, to pay for his research. Marisa Ramirez appears as Evelyn Santos, a former police officer and single mother. The father of her child, John, is in prison. Not much is known about how she started working with Keel, though a deleted scene showed she was shot in the head while on duty and had a paranormal experience where she felt she saw nothing on the other side. Héctor Elizondo plays Father Poppi Calero, Paul’s lifelong mentor and a priest at the church where Paul grew up and once worked. He first appeared in the pilot and then returned in later episodes. Jacob Smith plays Tommy Ferguson, a ten-year-old boy from Cottonwood, Arizona, who has healing powers. These powers were discovered when he hugged his grandmother, who had lung cancer, and told her he hoped she felt better; two days later she left the hospital with her cancer completely gone. Tommy gave up his own life to save Paul after Paul’s car was hit by a train, leaving Tommy near death. He first appeared in the pilot and later came back as a ghost in the episodes Little Miss Lost and Paul is Dead.

Production

In early 2001, series creator Richard Hatem received a screenplay titled "Miracles," written by Michael Petroni and owned by Spyglass Entertainment. Hatem assumed he was being asked to rewrite it for a feature film, but he was puzzled because he felt the script was already excellent as it was. His agent then clarified that Spyglass wanted him to use the screenplay as a foundation for a one-hour television series, described as a "spiritual X-Files." When Hatem met with Spyglass executives Megan Wolpert and Suzanne Patmore, he brought a "good luck charm": the book "The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism" by Herbert Thurston. Hatem later said the series evolved from this book. Thurston, an Anglican minister, investigated spiritual phenomena during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when spiritualism—contacting the dead through séances and mediums—remained popular in America. The book explored which phenomena were signs from God and which were something else. Discussing this with Wolpert and Patmore, Hatem expected a 20-minute meeting, but it stretched into three hours, with ideas flowing freely. Hatem claimed the show was born that day, in that room, in March 2001. The trio liked the concept of a character named Paul Callan, who came from a strict religious background and was raised to believe any strange occurrence was either from God or the devil. He is suddenly thrust into a world where various phenomena cross those boundaries, containing elements of both good and evil, making them impossible to classify. Hatem believes this ambiguity creates the drama and makes the show both fun and scary.

Broadcast history

Critics liked it, and it had a small, devoted fanbase, but Miracles couldn’t find an audience, with most of the blame falling on how ABC handled its timeslot. After just three episodes aired, the show was yanked from the schedule for weeks. Series creator Richard Hatem said this happened “for several different reasons.” On February 10, 2003, all three of ABC’s Monday night dramas hit season-low ratings, so the network pulled them for the rest of the February sweeps. The Miracles slot on February 17 was filled by a rerun of the Granada documentary Living with Michael Jackson, and on February 24 by a rerun of The Bachelorette season finale. Two more episodes finally aired in early March 2003, but then ABC preempted its Monday lineup for another two weeks—even though the network had promoted that The Practice and Miracles would run six straight weeks of new episodes starting March 3. On March 17, ABC devoted the whole night to news about the looming Iraq War, and on March 24, only a new episode of The Practice aired at 10:00 p.m. The final broadcast episode, “Hand of God,” aired on March 31, 2003, pulling in five million viewers and a 1.8 rating/5 share among adults 18–49. ABC officially canceled the series on April 3, 2003, and filled the Monday 10:00 p.m. hour with reruns of The Practice for the rest of the season. The show’s message boards on ABC’s website were shut down 24 hours later. Over its six-episode run, Miracles ranked 105th in the Nielsen ratings, averaging 6.53 million viewers and a 2.5 rating/6 share in adults 18–49. The seven remaining episodes never aired in the United States. Canada’s VisionTV started airing the show on October 3, 2003, and broadcast all 13 episodes—the first time the final seven were seen on television. VisionTV later reran the entire series on Monday nights from January through March in both 2004 and 2005.