Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Highway To Heaven’ On Lifetime, A Reboot Of The ‘80s Drama With Jill Scott And Barry Watson Providing Heavenly Assistance

Highway To Heaven was Michael Landon’s last series; for four years, he and Victor French rode around the country giving heavenly assistance to those in need. Now the popular series is being revived as a series of Lifetime movies. This time, Jill Scott plays Angela, an angel of a different sort than Landon’s Johnathan Smith. Read on for more.

HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Angela Stewart (Jill Scott) walks into a middle school in Boulder, Colorado, looking to fill a temporary opening for a guidance counselor. The principal, Bruce Brooks (Barry Watson) loves her credentials, but wonders why she’s applying for a temporary spot. But he hires her, and right away she’s put into service to help Cody Grier (Ben Daon), a bright 8th-grader who has been doing nothing but getting himself in trouble since his mother died the year before.

We already know that Angela has help from “the boss,” who does things like help flowers bloom when she looks at them. So she tries to get Cody to open up about how his mother’s death has affected him. She gives him a ride home in order to introduce herself to his dad Jeff (Robert Moloney). He’s a chef who was going to open a restaurant with Cody’s mother Melissa (Ashley Ross), and never revisited those plans after she died. He has put all signs of Melissa in a utility room closet, thinking that’s the best for Cody.

Through several of Angela’s actions, she discovers that Cody wants to see these things, and in the process of getting the closet open, a bunch of old holiday presents spill out. One of the latest ones has the return address of a math tutoring website. He is failing math, so she signs him up. There, he is taught by a 12-year-old prodigy named Kaia (Sasha Rojen).

As she probes Cody and Jeff to find out more about why the two of them have both shut down in their own ways, she arranges Kaia and Cody to meet in person and create a robot for a school robotics tournament. It’s there that Cody sees the same photo of his mother that he saw in the utility room closet.

This is when he finds out for the first time that Kaia is his cousin and that Kaia’s mom, Vanessa (Victoria Bidewell), used to be close to his mom until her initial cancer diagnosis when he was a baby. After Vanessa panicked and abandoned Melissa, Jeff cut off contact.

In the meantime, Angela and Barry are quickly becoming buddies. After a fun day at the “batting field,” as she calls it, they go back to her apartment (just for him to use the bathroom), and he sees that there is no luggage or anything else; this is after he couldn’t find her on the alumni list of the college where she said she went.

This is when she admits to Barry that she’s an angel, sent not only to help out Cody but also Barry. Of course, Barry doesn’t believe her, and looks to fire her after he witnesses her using Cody’s school email to invite his aunt and cousin to the tournament. Will he come around, and will Angela be able to bring Cody’s family back together?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: While this is a remake of Michael Landon’s Highway To Heaven, which ran from 1984-89, this new version of the series feels a little more like Touched By An Angel, for reasons we’ll explain below.

Performance Worth Watching: Jill Scott is incredibly charming as the perpetually positive Angela. She doesn’t make the role too saccharine, and gives her angelic character a lot of heart and just the right amount of wiseacre attitude to make her as human as any of the human characters in the movie.

Memorable Dialogue: We kept fixating on the “1996 BASEBALL” pennant behind Barry’s desk. We know he was on the baseball team of his college, and almost went pro. But that pennant is so generic, we wonder why they didn’t cheer “YAY SPORTS!” at some point during the movie.

Sex and Skin: None. The movie is rated TV-G, and is definitely OK for kids 7 and up.

Our Take: This new Highway To Heaven series, written by Angelica Chéri and Cathryn Humphris — Landon’s estate produces it along with Scott and Howard Braunstein — is intended to be the first of a series of movies on Lifetime. It’s pretty obviously an introduction to Angela, Barry, and how the two came to work together to give people around the country some heavenly assistance in their troubled lives.

The 90-minute film (without commercials) establishes this origin story well, but for the most part, the story’s throwback feel made us just want to watch the reruns of Landon’s version again. It’s such a lightweight story, despite the fact that it involves a dead mother, a disaffected teenager, and an estranged sister, that without the charm of Scott and her chemistry with Watson tying it down, it would float out of our memories almost instantly.

One thing we have to get out of the way before we go on: This version of Highway To Heaven comes dangerously close to perpetuating the trope where a “magical” Black person comes and gives wise counsel and assistance to a largely white cast. Most of the time, it’s a supporting player. But here, it’s the star. Scott’s aura and energy overcome this trope, and we hope subsequent films have more diverse casts, but the unfortunate choice to make the rest of the cast mostly white may invite some backlash.

And another thing: Where is some of this “magic” that Angela is using, where she can send emails, make flowers bloom or close and lock doors without touching them? Is this the same as “The Stuff” that Landon’s angelic character had at his disposal? It feels like Angela has more direct “powers” than Johnathan Smith did, which makes the show feel more mystical, akin to Touched By An Angel than the more down-to-earth Landon series.

But all that being said, if Scott and Watson can display the same chemistry that they did in this first movie, the new Highway To Heaven will still be very watchable, despite what’s likely to be a wide quality swing for each story.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The new Highway To Heaven isn’t highbrow by any means, but it’s good family entertainment, with a really winning lead performance by Jill Scott.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Highway To Heaven On MyLifetime.com