strange times; From near-apocalypse to a rough and rowdy British family, Joan Juliet Buck finds mayhem on tv.

The flavor of the month, I regret to say, is the End of the World, the ultimate battle between good and evil. Our president would be the first to tell you that Armageddon is just around the corner, and he's not the only one. In your bookstore

the "No Child Left Behind" series-sorry, the Left Behind series-has now sold some 42 million copies in twelve volumes of an apocalyptic, postrapture epic in which believers are sucked up right out of their clothes and, famously, out of the cockpits of planes, to meet the Baby Jesus, and the Jews who are left behind have to convert each other. If you'd been paying attention to Carnivale on HBO you'd know that the ultimate battle between good and evil actually took place during the Depression and was played out between two blond men, Amy Madigan, a fat lady, and a dwarf. The End of the World, first scheduled for the year 1000, was postponed until the end of the twentieth century, and still has not arrived. My personal copy of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid that hails from Boca Raton, Florida, says that the End Times are not due until 2012.

But NBC disagrees. Revelations, a series in which the End of Days happens Right Now, starts airing April 13. The title sequence of Revelations bears a curious resemblance to the one that opens Carnivale, where tarot cards give birth to falling angels, soup lines, shots of the dust bowl, Ku Klux Klansmen, Breughel peasants, and God the Father himself. Revelations begins in the same mode of portentous fine diction, on a background of elegant dirge music, with a lecture about the Big Bang. There's something cheap and irresistible, like too much salt on potato chips, about the suggestion that there is a master plan behind the sum of human misery.

Revelations begins as its hero, a Harvard physics professor named Richard Massey, flies home from Santiago, Chile, with the handcuffed Satanist who killed his daughter and ate her heart. This story is already lurid enough, and there's creepy stuff even in the crevices between fiction and fact: Richard Massey is played by the impenetrable Bill Pullman, and the Satanist by the actor Michael Massee, who has the distinction of being the man who actually pulled the trigger in the accidental shooting of Brandon Lee during the making of The Crow.

Natascha McElhone luminously inhabits the character of Sister Josepha, a nun who works for something called the Ekland Foundation, chasing miracles-from the shadow of a crucifix floating over a mesa in Mexico to the hospital bedside of a young girl hit by lightning. Sister Josepha takes the girl's hand, looks up at a priest, and exclaims, "She's ...