“Ours is not a country – and thank heavens for it – in which a company called Praise The Lord Television could ever grow into a mighty broadcasting network,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. Yet in the US, PTL was once the fourth-biggest TV network behind NBC, ABC and CBS. This “unexpectedly moving” biopic tells the story of the couple behind PTL, Tammy Faye Bakker (Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain) and her preacher husband Jim (Andrew Garfield). “An evangelical Barbie and Ken,” they started from the bottom with a puppet show, and gradually gained a cult TV following, convincing viewers that “the more they gave, the more God would love them”. But their “gaudy temple came crashing down” in 1987, when it emerged that Jim “had been misappropriating funds, even using some to pay off a church secretary who alleged he had raped her”.
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