Prayer on TV is sort of a pet project for me. I’m always on the lookout for it because it’s something that’s extremely common in life but comparatively rare on TV. According to a Pew Forum survey, 55 percent of American adults say they pray at least daily. And 77 percent say that religion is either very or somewhat important in their lives. I don’t in any way expect or even want TV to be a strictly representative portrayal of society, but this strikes me as something it is particularly unlikely to depict. (“Last Chance U” is a documentary, so it plays by different rules than scripted programming.) Is it something you keep an eye out for?

JAMES PONIEWOZIK It’s interesting you bring up prayer, because that points up a basic question: What does it even mean to incorporate faith into a TV story? I’m not sure it really counts as a treatment of faith simply to know that a character celebrates this holiday or that one. So prayer, at least, is one kind of external marker.

Why does this kind of representation matter? Because religious diversity is not getting any less important in public life. Because good stories are specific, and personal faith (or the conscious lack of it) is as specific as it gets. And because religion tries to answer some of the same questions that art does, about human frailties and emotion and dealing with the knowledge that you will die someday.

That can be a bummer! So TV networks have viewed it as a subject that gets you in trouble. You might get a sunshiny picture of it — the “7th Heaven” approach — or, occasionally, you got religion treated as an “issue,” in controversial, short-lived series like “Nothing Sacred.” Or it would be a device to signal that things had gotten real, as when President Bartlet tore into God on “The West Wing.”