Stephen Goddard reviews God, the Devil and Bob – the cartoon series rejected by NBC in America and now showing on BBC tv that makes God loser-friendly.

The creators of the world's most famous superhero had the same problem. In the 1930s, comic writers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman who, in spite of the name, wasn't even capable of flight. In those early days, the best he could do was leap tall buildings "in a single bound".

Ten years later everything had changed. Superman had evolved. The post-World War II "man of steel" could even survive an Hiroshima-sized atomic holocaust. From then on there was no stopping him. He travelled back through time to take on the dinosaurs, defended Camelot, met Merlin, saved President Franklin Roosevelt's life, turned time itself backward. He even died and rose again.

In fact, he became so powerful he became irrelevant. Public interest waned.

So they re-constructed him in the 1980s – making him more vulnerable, less powerful. Some of his zanier abilities, such as super-ventriloquism, were abandoned.

It may seem a quantum leap of superhuman proportions, but a similar pattern has emerged at different times in Church history. The transcendent God of the Middle Ages, for example, had to be re-packaged after the Black Death almost wiped out entire cities. How could a God who allowed such calamity really care for his creation? The visual focus changed – to Jesus, as suffering servant sharing in our fallen humanity. God became loser-friendly.

The God of the Bible has been recast. Gone is the distant cloud hopper. Now he's a laconic, grey-haired hippy in shades, strolling round downtown Detroit, sipping lite beer, engaging, when he chooses to, with humanity – and his opposite number. The Devil, curiously English, is more orthodox, sporting goatee beard, horns and a cloak borrowed, surely, from Batman.

The series turns on an early scene in which our disarmingly downbeat and disillusioned deity admits his despair with mankind.

"Sometimes I think about chucking the whole thing in and starting over," he says to the Devil. The Devil agrees but God changes his mind and decides to give humanity one last chance to show him it is worth redeeming.

The Devil carefully handpicks the person to save mankind – the hapless, dysfunctional Bob Alman who becomes torn between divinity and depravity. Bob – ignorant, selfish, conceited – resents the task of grafting eternal qualities onto his dubious, decadent lifestyle.

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