Think of it as a modern day Christmas Carol with a female Ebeneezer Scrooge, being told to change his ways before it's too late. Only in Grace's case, she's denying God, refusing to turn to Him for help, is on a path of self-destruction and ruin, damning her soul in the process.
As others have stated on this board, Earl is a Last Chance Angel. He's there not to protect her or to change her so much as to make her see how important she really is.
She feels completely worthless, mostly due to her childhood and the repeated sexual abuse she had thanks to a Catholic priest. Her promiscuity is a direct result of that. She would die for her friends but still would never feel it was enough. Nothing she does is enough because she doesn't feel worthy. And it's part of the reason why she fought so hard to accept God's love.
The most basic article of faith states that God loves each of His children, regardless of what they have done, so long as they allow Him into their hearts. It isn't that Grace is meant to be viewed as a "good" human being. She's as flawed as they come, just as Neely is, but she's someone who, but for the "grace of God" would have led quite a different life indeed if her faith had not been shattered and trampled at such as young age.
Saving a "good" person is pretty darn easy. They generally are already accepting of God's love and are selfless when it comes to doing good for others. It's trying to "save" those that are desperately flawed and broken that's much, much harder.
There's an episode with Matthew (played by F. Murray Abraham), a fellow Last Chance Angel like Earl, who has failed miserably to deliver souls to God, by a count of a million or more, whereas Earl has only failed 16 or 17 times. Matthew's approach was to bribe, coerce, anything to trade for the person's soul, much like a demon would, and Grace rejected him in favor of Earl because even she could see the difference. If she were truly without any hope of redemption, I doubt she would have hesistated to accept Matthew's offer and rejected Earl.
The show is difficult to watch. I'm not a huge fan of Holly Hunter's to begin with, but the story intrigued me when I first starting watching it. I realized they had to go over the top occasionally to drive home just how low Grace was sinking, how little her life mattered to her, how insignificant the consequences of her actions would be to her.
But as the show progressed, an episode here or there would reveal another piece of her past and her troubled conscience. The death of her sister Mary Frances, learning that Father Murphy was still alive, Ronnie's cheating on Retta, each moment demonstrated how fragile she really was, hanging on by the barest of threads -- nicely shown also as she sat in the police car after hitting and killing little Esperanza with her car, finding that bit of thread on a screw in the backseat.
The teachings of most faiths stresses that this life we have is not the end but the beginning. Grace rushes headlong into danger at every opportunity because she doesn't understand that. She believes she is a horrible person who somehow deserves all the harm that's befallen her so there will be no paradise waiting for her. Prayer is useless. She's prayed for salvation from Father Murphy and those prayers seemingly fell on deaf ears. She's prayed for her sister and all those in the Murrah building and those went unanswered too. She was a first responder there, entering just shortly after the bombing trying to find survivors.
She feels as though she's failed at everything despite the many lives she's saved. It's never enough for her. And all Earl is trying to do is bring her some peace, just as he did with Leon Cooley. It was never about getting him released from prison or getting a stay from the execution, but for Leon to not lose his faith, to accept God, Allah, whatever would bring him peace, so that his soul would not be damned.
He's trying to do the same with Grace. It's not about trying to turn her into a "good" person or get her to stop sleeping around, boozing and generally throwing her life away. It's to get her to accept something that is greater than herself, to accept that all prayers are heard and that the answer to some of them isn't always what we'd hope them to be.
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