'The Chosen' Sets a New Gold Standard for Depictions of Jesus
(REVIEW) The makers of the TV show The Chosen and their streaming platform VidAngel have just made watching their show free until Mar. 30 to help people quarantined by the novel coronavirus outbreak. Additionally, The Chosen’s YouTube page is streaming one episode live a week starting Mar. 29, ending with the season finally on Palm Sunday. This means it’s the perfect time to watch what might be one of the single best portrayals of Jesus in film and TV history.
Film depictions of Jesus (like anything in the Bible) always struggle to balance faithfulness to the source material with imaginative storytelling. Use too little imagination and you lose the ability to help people engage with the material at the deepest level. Be too imaginative and you stray too far from any version of Jesus that is in the Bible and therefore any version of him his followers will engage with (and perhaps, is worth engaging with). Such depictions of Jesus often find themselves at either side of the American culture wars, with conservative Christians calling imaginative depictions, like The Last Temptation of The Christ, blasphemous, and its fans calling the critics narrow-minded and fearful.
With all this disagreement, is it possible to depict Jesus in a way that balances the need for imagination and faithfulness?
The Chosen answers that question with a resounding “yes”.
The Chosen is a TV show with one season out of a planned eight seasons that tells the story of the gospels through the eyes of people whose lives were forever changed by meeting him. The show is the biggest crowd-funded media project of all time, raising more than $11 million to fund their first season, eclipsing the $5.8 million by the previous record-holder, Mystery Science Theater 3000.
So far, the series pilot has been viewed over 15 million times around the world since premiering on April 19 last year. The filmmakers hope “to make 'The Chosen' bigger than the 'Game of Thrones' billion-view record" and "the most-watched global series in history.”
The Chosen is refreshingly creative and dramatic in fleshing out the people in Jesus’ life. Nichodemus is imagined as a Pharisee who goes through a crisis of faith when he finds out Jesus can perform miracles. Matthew is a possibly autistic tax collector who struggles with his status as a Jew working for the occupying Romans. Simon Peter is in debt to the Romans and will be taken to prison if he doesn’t get any fish by morning. These additions give the characters dramatic arcs that can pay off in deeply satisfying ways. For Simon, this allows the stakes of the story to be raised so that when Jesus performs his miracle of the fish it is an act of salvation for him rather than just a miracle. Yes these creative licenses never leap so far out as to feel unfaithful to the letter or spirit of the people and narrative.
The portrayal of Jesus himself also hits that balance of imagination and faithfulness. Jesus primarily says things found in scripture or adapted from things in scripture, but he also says and does many things that are not in scripture. He cracks jokes, teases his disciples, and openly talks to God about his struggles. Yet, none of this contradicts the picture that most faithful Christians have of Jesus. The series also makes the welcome change of having Jesus and his disciples portrayed as distinctively Middle Eastern rather than the traditional Hollywood trope of casting white actors.
This unusual balance is probably due to the fact that the director and showrunner, Dallas Jenkins (the son of Left Behind co-author Jerry B. Jenkins), is both a committed evangelical Christian and a committed artist. In his Biblical Roundtable series that is paired with The Chosen on VidAngel he discusses each episode of The Chosen with a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and an evangelical Christian, to discuss the care they took in making sure that the show was faithful.
“We wanted to be as close to the life of Christ as humanly possible, but still have a show,” he says.
But Jenkins also discusses how differently he reacts to great art than many of his evangelical friends. When he walks into historical churches with great art inside, he reacts with awe, but some of his evangelical friends become extremely uncomfortable, considering some art pieces idolatry.
I was blessed to meet Jenkins at the Hollywood Divine Film Festival last year, and reached out to him to discuss the show and how he approached writing it.
“I start with the premise that we're not going to change anything that's in Scripture,” Jenkins said. “And then that anything we add is going to be plausible and not a contradiction to the character of Christ or the gospels.”
Even with that faithfulness to scripture, Jenkins believed there was a lot to be gained from fleshing out the events in the gospels in ways other versions hadn’t already:
“This show is a response to what I felt was a ‘sameness’ in most of the movies about Jesus. I love many of them, but I believe there's room for a multi-season show that allows us to explore the stories and people from the gospels much deeper. Instead of rushing from miracle to miracle with no emotional connection to the people Jesus encountered, we take the time to develop backstories and historical and cultural context.”
His influences also give a clear idea of where his heart lies in storytelling.
“My favorite filmmakers of all time include Frank Capra, Rob Reiner, Cameron Crowe, and Quentin Tarantino, and I think the common thread among those filmmakers is that they do a good job of earning joyous and funny moments by not shying away from the painful journey to get there,” Jenkins said.
This balance clearly pays off. Christians who are typically very unforgiving toward creative depictions of Jesus’ life are responding to this series with atypical enthusiasm. At film festivals when I talk to Christians, everyone there is deeply excited about The Chosen. And the series succeeds on a purely dramatic level as well. Because we care about the characters, we care whether or not they respond to Jesus' call, whether they do or not becomes a source of drama. As Jesus' enemies become more aware of Jesus and more threatened by him the show simmers with tension as Jesus is set on a collision course with people who don’t want him to upset their power. The confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees at the healing of the paralytic is one of the most dramatic moments of the show, and it’s one that the filmmakers earn because they take the time to build to it.
Jenkins is also aware of how important Jesus is to many faith traditions, from Catholics to Muslims to Protestants, and even Jews. Jenkins thinks the way they portray Jesus is one of the strengths of the show:
“I believe that most of the religious and denominational differences and debates were created after Christ's life, and our show is just focused on his life. We're focused on making as good a show as we can based on his life and the history of that time, which is why I believe so many different faith traditions are appreciating the show. There's quite a lot of agreement about the stories of Christ, if not what they all meant long-term. ”
But Christians don’t have to worry that the showrunners are trying to water down the uniquely Christian view of Jesus and his life. When I asked what story beats he was most looking forward to exploring, he said, “I of course can't wait to get to the crucifixion and resurrection.” But don’t expect them to get to that for a long while, since The Chosen is planned as an eight-season series.
“My job in this show is to make sure that those moments are as impactful as possible because of what we've taken years to develop,” Jenkins said.
The fact that the show can so easily be compared to the quality of modern mainstream TV might be its biggest weakness. Because it comes across as so close to the quality of a Netflix or HBO series, any instance it doesn't achieve that level of quality, whether because of budget, acting or writing, it shows -- even if those instances are not the majority.
Sometimes the scenes are so darkly lit, it feels like they’re making the scenes dark to hide that they lack the higher budget for elaborate sets. Additionally, for a show that wants to have mainstream appeal, The Chosen relies a little bit too much on the assumption that you already know and care about Jesus’ story and world, unlike shows such as Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey, which were accessible to anyone who had a passing familiarity with fantasy or aristocracy. That said, anyone who is already interested in the topic or message of the show will likely be blown away by what the series achieves, since it is so much closer than nearly anything we’ve gotten before.
And to those who want to see more seasons, is there any way that they can help? “‘Paying it forward’ is the primary way, along with buying DVDs,” Jenkins says. “Both those opportunities are in ‘The Chosen’ app. People also love our shirts and hoodies and whatnot, and the income from those sales goes directly to future seasons.”
Obviously, no portrayal of Jesus can completely please everybody, but this series seems to be as close as we can ever hope to get. You can tell by listening to Jenkins the deep excitement he has for all the stories he hopes to tell:
“I'm really looking forward to developing the relationships of the disciples and their personal lives and how following Jesus in person would have impacted all that, and vice versa. Just exploring the humanity of that experience is exciting to me. And like any other show, we're going to have romance, laughter, tears, surprises, cliffhangers, etc., all the things I haven't really seen in Bible projects, so that'll be fun. And there are a few Bible stories, such as the bleeding woman who touched Jesus' garment, and the cripple at the pool who'd been there for decades, that I can't wait to explore and portray.”
Hopefully, he gets the chance.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated independent filmmaker and film critic living out of New York City. He runs a blog, Overthinking Films, where he discusses how films connect to philosophy, society, and culture.