Parish
The programmer's note
We greenlight pilots here in the sense that we programme them and say so out loud. This one earns a season. Brannigan does not make the church the joke, which is the trap, and he does not make Aoife a saint either. Watch the funeral sequence twelve minutes in, where the comedy stops for ninety seconds and then starts again without a bump. If you have ever worked somewhere the org chart was fiction, this is your show.
The film
Saint Brigid's, Clondalkin, has one thousand four hundred registered families, a roof that leaks over the confessional and, as of Tuesday, no priest. Father Malachy has been moved to Navan. The diocese sends a letter about a review. Aoife Traynor, who has run the parish office for eleven years and is not, as she keeps telling people, in charge of anything, finds herself scheduling a funeral, a christening and the Thursday bingo in a building she cannot legally open on her own. The pilot plays the week as workplace comedy with the stakes of a closure notice: a curate on loan who does not want to be there, a caretaker with strong opinions about the boiler, and a family who need a funeral Mass by Friday. Brannigan is interested in what a parish actually is once you subtract the theology, which turns out to be a building, a mailing list and about forty people who reliably show up. The last scene sets the season running.
