So what do you do when you discover George Michael singing “Faith” live in your living room while you’re making love to your fiancée? What happens when you hear bursts of organ music and choral singing when you’re trying to do your job as a corporate lawyer in a skyscraper perched atop San Francisco? What’s your next move if someone says you may be a prophet destined to perform good works rather than win high-profile legal cases?

Such is the dilemma facing the title character (Jonny Lee Miller) in “Eli Stone,” a wholesome, touching, occasionally amusing, and thought-provoking new series making its premiere Thursday on ABC, and it’s not surprising that he soon passes out in a dead faint, suffering a mild concussion as a result. This leads him to see Nathan (Matt Letsher), a neurologist who also happens to be his older brother. The news, according to an MRI, is good. There’s nothing wrong with Eli’s brain; he’s simply suffering from stress, or perhaps the pressure of having to keep his brisk Aryan goddess of a fiancée, Taylor (Natasha Henstridge), happy in and out of bed. Not only is she several inches taller than he is, she also happens to be the daughter of his icy boss, Jordan Wethersby (Victor Garber).

Even if it is just stress, the stress continues, as stress tends to do, and it leads Patti (Loretta Devine), Eli’s sharp-tongued assistant, to encourage him to visit an acupuncturist in Chinatown who she swears is the real thing. Dr. Chen (James Saito) duly mispronounces the English language and sticks needles in Eli’s forehead. These bring back long-repressed memories, such as the fact that he lost his virginity to a more experienced girl while listening to a song by none other than George Michael. If you’re wondering about the curious subtextual hints — gay British pop singer, boy choirs, etc. — well, who wouldn’t? In the meantime, they just sit there, winking at you. Perhaps they merely indicate that, deep down, Eli is the sensitive type of lawyer. Certainly his newest client, Beth Keller (Laura Benanti), seems to think so. She is the very pretty mother of a young boy whose autism, she claims, was caused by the preservative in a vaccine produced by a giant pharmaceutical company. Despite the inconvenient fact that Eli’s law firm is representing the pharmaceutical in question, she has a puzzling faith (“You gotta have faith” — G. Michael) that Eli will take on her case.

Hallucinating George Michael and hearing strange noises in your head is one thing; it’s another when Eli finds himself on the ledge of a terrace dozens of stories above street level while imagining he’s up on a snowy mountain. That’s when Nathan decides to take another look at that MRI of Eli’s brain, because it turns out their late father, written off by the family as a hopeless drunk long before he died, tended to behave the same way. This time the news isn’t so good. Eli has a tiny but inoperable aneurysm buried deep inside his brain, possibly inherited from his dad.

The question the show now poses is this: Do the results of the brain scan explain away Eli’s visions and prophetic insights (for such they turn out to be) as purely neurological phenomena with no bearing on the universe at large, or do the visions possess their own validity no matter what the brain scan says? In other words, does science provide a partial or a complete answer to existence? And, extrapolating a little, if Eli gains semidivine, logic-defying insights because of a minor cerebral malfunction, would this also imply that Nietzsche thought God was dead simply because he was suffering from incurable syphilis?

Who knows, and I apologize if I’ve put you off the program. Not to worry: “Eli Stone” is a cleverly crafted series that straddles several familiar genres. One is the nasty-lawyer-turned-nice (“Shark”); another is the ever-expanding slate of programs dealing with the supernatural and inexplicable (“Joan of Arcadia,” “Pushing Daisies,” “Journeyman,” “Lost,” etc.). With Mr. Michael due to make repeat appearances, it also dips its toe in the dangerous waters of the musical drama, though it is unlikely to go the way of the canceled “Viva Laughlin.” The show also fits snugly inside two other well-worn narrative formats: first, as an account of a midlife crisis, and second, as the story of a man who, in the face of adversity, develops a more generous heart and begins to use his legal skills to fight for autistic children and other deserving parties rather than the blue-chip corporations he’s been accustomed to servicing.

As Eli, Mr. Miller, a British actor (though you wouldn’t know it) is fortunate he has to start playing the mystical seeker almost immediately, since he’s not entirely convincing as a corporate lawyer whose only concern is for the company’s bottom line. With his puppy-dog eyes and boyish features, he makes a winning lead, but it’s really the bit players — Mr. Saito (the best thing in the show) as the acupuncturist who turns out to be less stereotypically “enigmatic” than he appears, and Ms. Devine as Patti — who provide the sparks and flashes of humor.

Most series, no matter how cleverly written, tend to get soapier as they go along. The danger with the spiritually inclined “Eli Stone” is that it will merely get sappier. But if it can tackle the question of whether we are more than the sum of our genes and neurons and address the future of the “soul” with at least a smidgen of intelligence, it may prove worth squinting at over the long haul.

Intellectuals from Daniel Dennett to Martin Amis insist that religious belief is an atavistic relic whose burial (without a prayer service) is long overdue. Yet TV shows and popular music keep fighting back, insisting on its relevance.

bbernhard@earthlink.net