One of the biggest TV shows on Earth at the moment is a show that, in all likelihood, you’ve never even heard of. It’s called The Chosen and it’s a dramatisation of the life of Jesus Christ. Although you may not have seen it, its makers claim that 280m people around the world have. I find it odd, reading a figure like that. Here is a show that has been running for six years and pulling in enormous numbers of viewers—so much so that the production sometimes releases new episodes into cinemas—and I’d not even heard its name. But I am not the target audience. Neither, probably, are you. Or, at least, you weren’t until recently. For a few years, The Chosen was only available on its own dedicated platforms, but now a much wider audience can find the series on Netflix and Amazon.
The showrunner is a man called Dallas Jenkins, an evangelical Christian who believes that God spoke to him while he was mowing his lawn some years ago and told him he should make high-quality Christian film content. Over its four seasons so far, The Chosen has been made with the help of crowdfunding to the tune of almost $100m. The concept was to tell the story of the life of Jesus, as related in the Gospels, in the manner of a prestige, big-budget TV drama. And why not? It’s a dramatic story with a large cast of characters that is, helpfully, out of copyright and has an enormous existing fanbase, if you can call it that. “We feel like if people can binge watch and have watch parties all over the world for shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things, there’s no reason not to binge watch a show about Jesus,” Jenkins told the Chicago Sun Times.
The surprise of The Chosen isn’t that it’s popular. There are more than 200m Christians in the US, and people always need something to watch. The surprise is that it doesn’t suck. Perhaps I am the fool for having thought that it might, but the term “Christian media” doesn’t conjure much in the way of quality in my mind. Nevertheless, this is a perfectly good TV show. It’s well-acted, well-paced, doesn’t look cheap or amateurish, is built on solid characterisation and generally non-clunky dialogue. It’s not Mad Men, but it’s not Veggie Tales either. Jesus performs his big-hit miracles, but the focus is not on his otherworldly eminence, rather on the ordinary people around him, which proves to be a smart move in making the show feel more akin to other prestige dramas, rather than purely a work of evangelism. “We like to say that we’re taking Jesus down from statues and stained-glass windows,” Jenkins told the BBC recently. And it has made big waves in the Christian world. The actor who plays Jesus in the show, Jonathan Roumie, has met the Pope twice.
The surprise of ‘The Chosen’ is that it doesn’t suck
While The Chosen may have flown under the radar for most people not engaged in the world of Christian media, Amazon was watching. Early last year, Amazon MGM Studios partnered with something called The Wonder Project, of which Jenkins is shareholder and special adviser, to produce faith-based content. This March saw the release of House of David, another biblical drama, this time focusing on the life of the eventual king of Israel, he of the fight against Goliath. This one’s less good than The Chosen: more po-faced and less engaging, but it has still found huge numbers of viewers. At the time of writing, House of David is the fourth-most watched show on Amazon Prime.
Both these programmes are an example of what we might think of as “silent majority” television. They’re not being fawned over in magazine pages, discussed by culture vultures online or picking up television awards. They’re just quietly being watched by millions and millions of people in their homes. With regard to the US in particular, we are living in the silent majority’s era. Discovering the popularity of a show like this provokes a feeling akin to the disbelief of learning—as we all did recently for a second time—that vast swathes of the American public want Donald Trump as their president. It is not, strictly speaking, Trumpian to be a Christian, but I would hazard a guess that the Venn diagram intersection of Trump voters and The Chosen fans is a pretty healthy one. Apparently, 81 per cent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump last year.
Before each episode of The Chosen, there is a title card that actively encourages viewers to read the Gospels. At the moment, I’m not convinced The Chosen, or House of David, is functioning as a means of converting anybody to Christianity. They are preaching to the choir for now. But studios will go where the viewer numbers are, and so it seems likely that biblical dramas are going to appear in greater numbers. Who knows? Soon, we might even hear about it.
