Final Flight For 'Touched By An Angel'

Some hit series change the TV landscape with their outsized success, rewriting old rules and sparking new crazes.

"Touched By an Angel" changed something else: the viewers who kept this righteous, reassuring show on the air nine years, several of them as a top 10 fixture on Sunday nights.

"We may have been just a television show, but it really had the potential to touch people's lives in a very positive way," says Roma Downey, who since fall 1994 has radiated goodness as Monica, that angel with the Irish lilt. "I think our show had the potential to heal and to offer hope and inspiration. That, above anything else, is what I'm most proud of."

Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT, "Touched By an Angel" airs its series conclusion with Monica bucking for promotion from the powers above. She also faces her thorny final case: helping a mysterious drifter accused of a hideous crime for which no less than the devil (in the form of David Ogden Stiers) is out to prosecute him.

Other past guest stars (including Patty Duke, Marion Ross, Randy Travis and Patrick Duffy) join Downey and fellow series regulars Della Reese, John Dye and Valerie Bertinelli in as satisfying a finale as you could wish for.

But that doesn't make the tearful fade-out any easier.

"I think we're all aware that it's time to move on," says Downey, "but it's painful to let go."

Before she was touched by the series, Downey was an actress known, if at all, for playing Jackie Kennedy in a TV movie. She had appeared on Broadway with Rex Harrison. And she had also been a hat-check girl who was passed over for an Irish Spring soap commercial because "they said I didn't sound Irish enough."

Fortunately, CBS had no such qualms, and Downey was allowed to speak in the brogue of her native Derry.

"It was quite gracious of the network to decide, 'Who's to say an angel couldn't have an Irish accent?"'

So away went Monica (for who was to say an angel caseworker couldn't look like an auburn-haired, fine-featured beauty?) with her heavenly superior Tess, traveling from place to place to help everyday troubled souls - and to address human issues including AIDS, alcoholism, jealousy, racism and, of course, fear of mortality.

Downey hadn't signed on for a holy crusade - "I needed a job," she explains. But all the same, there was divine providence in the show's casting.

It so happened that Reese, who plays Tess, was not only a veteran actress and singer, but also an ordained minister with an active congregation in Los Angeles.

Similarly a person of faith, Downey likewise felt in synch with her character.

"When Monica tells someone 'God loves you,' I really believe it. If I didn't, after saying it so long I would have gone out of my mind."

Downey learned the power of religion to destroy as well as unite while growing up among the Catholic minority in troubled Northern Ireland. On her series, she says, "we have always reminded people that there is a God, that it's just the one God: the God of love. We were more spiritual than religious."

But in its first year, "Touched By an Angel" didn't seem to have a prayer of winning many converts. In a season best remembered for smash newcomers "ER" and "Friends," it ranked 77th.

Then in its second season (when Dye joined the cast as Andrew, the Angel of Death), the series rose to a solid 34th place. The next season, it was moved from Saturday to Sunday, where it burst into a full-fledged hit.

In fall 2001 (when Bertinelli became the fourth resident angel, Gloria), the series was packed off back to Saturday, a night when fewer viewers watch television. Its ranking plunged to 79th place. So far this season it's tied for 97th.

Downey is finishing out the school year in Salt Lake City, where "Angel" wrapped production in March and where she has resided with her 6-year-old daughter, Reilly.

But soon they will move to Los Angeles, where Downey is "hoping to take a wee bit of time just to regroup, to recharge." And to cope with her loss: "I'm going to miss Monica so much."

Like any soul or hit show, "Touched By an Angel" has an afterlife. Already old episodes get multiple airings Sunday through Thursday on cable's Hallmark Channel.

But CBS' series cancellation is the signal for a sort-of goodbye - and the cue for TV critics who long dismissed it to acknowledge that "Touched By an Angel" was a show like no other. Taking wholesome to a higher level, it dramatized the sacred with a blend of plainspokenness and mystery.

"One would think we'd leave a huge void," Downey says.

By Frazier Moore