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Winging it with 'The Messengers'

CW drama is latest to tap Book of Revelation for ideas.

* THE MESSENGERS. 9 tonight, CW57.

"HIS NAME was Death, and Hell followed with him," declares the hooded man who guns down nurse Rose Arvale (Anna Diop) in the opening moments of the CW's new drama "The Messengers."

Ah, the Book of Revelation. Where would TV writers be without it?

Already this season we've had a second serving of Fox's "Sleepy Hollow," and its intoxicating blend of Washington Irving, the Revolutionary War and the horsemen of the apocalypse, as well as the Jerusalem-focused thriller "Dig" (10 p.m. Thursdays, USA), in which prophecy and conspiracy are intertwined.

Starting tonight, we also have angels.

Not the the celestial social workers of "Touched by an Angel" or "Highway to Heaven," but five people whose wings show up only in reflections and whose missions here on earth aren't exactly spelled out in the pilot.

Seven years after the incident involving the man in the hoodie, a televangelist's rising son (Jon Fletcher), a scientist (Shantel VanSanten), a young mother (Sofia Black-D'Elia), a bullied teenager (Joel Courtney) and an undercover federal agent (JD Pardo) are all briefly struck dead at the same moment as something meteor-like falls to earth.

When they wake up, their already complicated lives are only going to be more complicated, thanks, I'm guessing, to the man (Diogo Morgado) who emerges, naked, from the crash zone. (Morgado, who played Jesus in both the History Channel's "The Bible" and the film "Son of God," seems to be coming from a different direction here.)

Guesswork - and a CW-provided synopsis - are all I have: The pilot is more setup than anything else, and its characters so far aren't that interesting.

Could "The Messengers" deliver some kind of coherent story without sensationalizing, or worse, trivializing the beliefs of millions?

Who knows?

But skipping it shouldn't be the end of the world.