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Sinners, saints, serial killers and Oprah: Two new dysfunctional TV families

All TV family dramas are not alike, even those kicked off by the return of prodigal sons or daughters to their rich families.

Gregory Alan Williams as Robert McCready , left, Lynn Whitfield as Lady Mae Greenleaf, and Lamman Rucker as Jacob Greenleaf.
Gregory Alan Williams as Robert McCready , left, Lynn Whitfield as Lady Mae Greenleaf, and Lamman Rucker as Jacob Greenleaf.Read more

All TV family dramas are not alike, even those kicked off by the return of prodigal sons or daughters to their rich families.

That point couldn't be made more clearly than it is in two new shows.

One is the Oprah Winfrey-produced Greenleaf, which makes its two-night, three-hour premiere on Winfrey's OWN on Tuesday and Wednesday. It's about a Memphis megachurch, the family who controls it, and the long-estranged daughter who may expose their secrets.

The other, CBS's American Gothic, which will premiere Wednesday, is about another influential family, this one in Boston, with a long-estranged son who may be a notorious serial killer (or may just know which one of them is).

Because even in the summer, CBS is Serial Killer Central.

I'd prefer to spend my summer with the Greenleaf family, if only because the church-centered world depicted by creator Craig Wright (Dirty Sexy Money, Six Feet Under) is one we don't often see on television (even if some of the secrets of that world may seem all too familiar to fans of Winfrey's long-running talk show).

When Grace "Gigi" Greenleaf (Merle Dandridge, The Night Shift) comes home after many years for her sister Faith's funeral, her father, Bishop James Greenleaf (Keith David), is overjoyed, her mother, Lady Mae (Lynn Whitfield), suspicious.

Not without reason.

Grace, once a rising star in the family-run church and now a TV newswoman and a single mother, didn't just fall away. She ran. And now, with a little help from her Aunt Mavis (Winfrey, in a recurring role), she's back to stir up trouble for the Greenleafs' tightly controlled empire.

The family has its sordid secrets - what TV family doesn't? - but Greenleaf stands out in those moments when we see how much Grace misses the life she once thought she had, one of absolute, or at least less complicated, belief.

After raising her own daughter, Sophia (Desiree Ross), as a Christmas-and-Easter Christian, she's surprisingly eager to give her a taste of the church-centered life she left behind. Yet she fails to see - as any parent might - that what Sophia is experiencing isn't so simple, either.

Adding a note of authenticity: Deborah Joy Winans, a member of the gospel singing Winans family who played her aunt CeCe in Lifetime's Whitney Houston biopic Whitney, is Grace's sister, Charity, who has ambitions beyond leading the musical portion of the service.

And on a local note, the third hour of Greenleaf was directed by Philadelphia's Charles Stone III (Drumline), son of the late Daily News columnist Chuck Stone.

'American Gothic' redux

It's been two decades since CBS last aired a show called American Gothic.

That Shaun Cassidy-produced drama, which starred Gary Cole (Veep) as a demonic sheriff, might have been a little ahead of its time.

The new, totally unrelated one premiering Wednesday isn't nearly so forward-looking. Or scary. Or interesting.

Virginia Madsen stars as Madeline Hawthorne, the matriarch of a prominent family whose members are undergoing public-relations makeovers for the mayoral campaign of her daughter Alison (Juliet Rylance). A family emergency calls the lost-sheep son Garrett (Antony Starr) home just as two more Hawthorne siblings, Tessa (Megan Ketch) and Cam (Justin Chatwin), discover a box full of silver bells that might be related to a string of stranglings. That's when things get uncomfortable.

Or maybe I was just shifting in my seat out of boredom.

It's not clear whether American Gothic is meant to be campy or whether it just plays that way, but as cold cases go, this one's lukewarm. And as the coincidences pile up, the murder mystery gets more and more muddled.

Speaking of coincidences: People who read credits might notice the name James Frey among the American Gothic executive producers. Frey is the writer who 10 years ago was the focus of an Oprah Winfrey Show interview in which she confronted him over allegations that portions of his purported memoir, A Million Little Pieces, a best-selling Oprah Book Club selection, were fiction. The two reportedly later reconciled. Now the shows they are producing will be facing off on Wednesday nights.

graye@phillynews.com

215-854-5950 @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray

TELEVISION

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Greenleaf 10 p.m. Tuesday, 9 and 10 p.m. June 22, OWN, moving to 10 p.m. Wednesdays on June 29.

American Gothic 10 p.m. Wednesday, CBSEndText