Canarsie Courier Arts and Entertainment

by Kate O’Hara

©2003 Tribune Media Services Ins.

MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH… For some people, the world is what they can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Others believe in an unseen world beyond the traditional five senses.

One of them is Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen. On ABC’s Monday-night supernatural drama “Miracles,” he plays Alva Keel, an enigmatic Englishman who runs a group investigating possibly miraculous occurrences with an eye toward a coming apocalypse of some sort.

“It’s very frightening (to only believe in what you can see),” Macfadyen says. “And the opposite of that is very frightening.”

Macfadyen doesn’t believe “Miracles” is confronting the deeper questions. “It’s not going full bore. There’s been a backing-off of that. It’s fear of alienating people. There’s only so much that’s going to happen on TV. If you want to do that, I guess you’d have to do it in theater or film.”

“He has a long, interesting background,” says executive producer David Greenwalt of the Keel character. “He’s the wealthy scion of a publishing family, went to Cambridge, probably would have wound up in MI5 or running the publishing empire, but strange things happened to him.

“He chose a different path for his life, one in which he will be continually laughed at and possibly never marry or have a family. There’s quite a bit of sacrifice involved in the work he does.”

Despite Keel’s sacrifice, he may not be the one to wind up with the answers. “Miracles” focuses on the character of Paul Callan (Skeet Ulrich), a former seminarian that is the focus of mystical occurrences. In the pilot, after learning of a vision Paul had, Keel recruits him into his group.