If I was the sort of person who told tales out of school, I could top ANYthing in that TV show with true stories from my former parish (and the parish before that).
Unfortunately, the ECUSA has been a refuge for fruits, nuts, and flakes for years and years. It has just now all come out in the open where it can no longer be ignored.
"If I was the sort of person who told tales out of school, I could top ANYthing in that TV show with true stories from my former parish (and the parish before that)."
And it's not just the Episcopal Church, either. My Presbyterian church in the early 1960's was a hotbed of barely-concealed scandal.
We had a 70-year-old deacon who all the high school girls knew to keep at a distance. He had what they called "Roman" hands.
The minister, who had been there for about 10 years at that time, had a son who was the chief bully at the high school. He ended up being arrested for writing bad checks. The daughter, who was a couple of years younger, had a well-deserved reputation as a wild child...a "sure thing" as we boys put it.
Finally, though, the minister was fired. It seems the minister's wife was playing around with another deacon, and got caught by the deacon's wife. So they fired the minister...something I never quite understood. He left town. The wife and the two rotten kids stayed there. The deacon she was messing with divorced his wife and married the former minister's wife. The deacon had a teenaged son, who promptly impregnated the daughter of the former minister.
The deacon with the Roman hands finally got caught with a 14-year-old girl in the church library. They were in a "compromising" position. He got a suspended sentence, of course, since he was a "pillar of the community."
Lots of interesting stories in the minister's house in many churches, I suspect.