Viewer Discretion: The Chosen — Part 1
Mr. Peter Newman
‘Happiness does not consist in amusement.’ — Aristotle
If you’re reading this, the odds are that you have studiously ignored ‘the small screen’ as it has shrunk down in recent years to almost swallowable dimensions and come to command more and more mind-altering levels of attention, to the point of constituting a brave new world of virtual unreality for many. The odds are also that you are ‘knowingly ignorant’ of popular entertainment and ‘wisely uninstructed’ in those amusements which meddle in faith and morals, even at the cost of not having had the opportunity to form nuanced opinions on particular diversions as they come and go (which is a highly fortuitous trade-off)!
One of the latest amusements is The Chosen, a hit internet TV series, which seeks to tell the story of Our Lord’s public life, through the eyes of the apostles and other (mostly fictional) disciples. Perhaps you have heard tell of the programme and are cautiously sceptical. Perhaps you are concerned about friends or family who follow it. Perhaps you have been left intellectually unsatisfied by the opinions (nuanced or not) of other Catholics and curious to watch the series for yourself, or have done so already and been bewildered by its blunders, if pleasantly surprised by its good elements. Whatever your awareness or perspective of The Chosen, and ‘the small screen’ in general, we will try here to begin an overview of what is, for better or for worse, a significant development in popular media, and to consider its content, conceits and suitability, both in general and for particular audiences.
Development and Production
In 2017, American film director Dallas Jenkins made a short film, The Shepherd, for the Christmas Eve service of his Evangelical congregation, Harvest Bible Chapel in Elgin, Illinois. The film attracted the attention of a Mormon streaming service, VidAngel, which was involved in copyright disputes with mainstream studios and looking for original content that fit its family-friendly and, broadly speaking, Christian audience (notwithstanding, among other enormities, heretical notions of the Holy Trinity which invalidate Mormon baptism despite its apparently orthodox formula). In 2018, a Facebook promotion, pitching the film as a ‘pilot episode’ for a multi-‘season’ series, garnered over 15 million views, on the strength of which VidAngel launched a crowdfunding campaign, securing $10 million dollars from over 16,000 (mostly private) donors. This feat of fundraising, accomplished without major studio backing, put the first ‘season’ (eight episodes) of The Chosen into production the following year, making it the largest crowd-funded media project of all time.
There is a parallel here with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which was the most successful independent film of all time until this distinction was snatched by the ‘meta’, obscene and ultraviolent comic-book adaptation, Deadpool (2016), indicating the ambivalent appetite of audiences for Christian drama on the one hand and for a very different kind of ‘Roman’ entertainment on the other. But while The Passion was a piece of heritage art cinema, The Chosen is a ‘midcult’ populist series, which lists among its own influences the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica and the false-medievalist fantasy series Game of Thrones.
The success of The Chosen was boosted significantly by the release of the second ‘season’ at the height of lockdown in 2021. According to Protestant historian Sébastien Fath, the success of the series during Covid can be explained in part by a need for consolation:
‘Many people have suffered socially and psychologically from the decline in social interaction induced by the pandemic. Isolation, depression and emotional problems have gained ground. The growing success of the acclaimed series, The Chosen, can be partly understood in this perspective. It takes us on a journey with Jesus and his disciples, men and women who live their daily lives in a climate of brotherhood. The peaceful, mischievous charisma of Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus, is no small part of the warm, fraternal atmosphere we are shown in each episode. We discover an inclusive and open community marked by a great deal of conviviality, affection, humour, tactile closeness and solidarity. Barriers which separate people, including those between men and women, fall under the prophetic effect of the word of Jesus, who includes men and women among the fraternity He chooses.’1
Another contributing factor in the success of the programme was the innovative ‘pay-it-forward’ scheme offered by VidAngel (which, on the wings of its success, rebranded as Angel Studios), ostensibly allowing viewers to donate to allow the ‘less fortunate’ to see it. Financial irregularities with this scheme (reportedly less than 40% of the proceeds were going to this armchair apostolate’s intended purpose) led the creators of The Chosen to terminate their contract with the Mormon company in 2024, but not before their partnership had helped establish the series as a worldwide phenomenon. The series has been dubbed into a dozen languages and subtitled in dozens more. It has even proved a hit on the ‘big screen’, with regular theatrical releases supplementing its distribution on the ‘small screen’ (and the ‘really small screen’) via The Chosen app and most recently by monolithic totem (and factotum), Amazon, which recently invested $700 million to lure another ready-made audience with its daringly woke, warmed-over Lord of the Rings franchise, The Rings of Power.
The Chosen has a large following among non-Christians but has also been praised and heartily recommended by Christians of all stripes, including not a few Catholic priests. It is clear that the creators are in good faith about dramatising the events of the Gospels in a way that is engaging for contemporary audiences, whose imaginations and expectations are largely informed by media of the ilk mentioned above. It is also clear that the writers of The Chosen are concerned with elements of good dramatic writing like nuance and subtext, often lacking from devotional drama. To give themselves room to manoeuvre, however, and to extend the series over multiple ‘seasons’ (totalling over 30 hours’ runtime just over halfway through its projected run), the creators take a degree of liberty unheard of in a biblical adaptaption, padding out the key moments of Our Lord’s public life with sensational subplots, contrived character development and often laughably anachronistic attempts at socio-historical world-building. Despite being proudly aloof from major studios, many aspects of the production are more ‘Hollywood’ than anything seen before in a Gospel adaptation, such as eyebrow-raising choices in casting and costume and a soundtrack that melds Middle-Eastern modes with rhythm and blues and slave spirituals.
Predicatbly, the script is written from, and appeals to, contemporary sensibilities. The words of the Gospels, appearing either in their archaic register or more contemporary renderings which jive with the show’s colloquial tone, are blended with supplementary material more or less opposed to spirit of the Gospel. The fact that the (mostly Protestant and Mormon) creators do not have the Catholic Faith or an orthodox interpretation of Scripture means they cannot but fall headlong into error; characters, including Jesus and Mary, often utter verses directly from Divine Revelation in the same breath as lines deserving of all degrees of theological censure, including propositions badly expressed, offensive to pious ears, temerarious and proximate to heresy.
Pathos and Bathos
Catholic actor, Jonathan Roumie’s affecting portrayal of Jesus so emphasises Our Lord’s human vulnerability as to undermine not only His Divinity but the perfection of His Humanity. Jesus is presented as a reluctant Messiah, racking his brains rewriting and rehearsing the Sermon on the Mount, with Matthew as script editor, the other apostles publicising ‘the show’ (sic) with papyrus flyers, the (again, mostly fictional) holy women as wardrobe department and Simon as the stage manager, who gives Jesus his cue to make his entrance through a curtain onto a raised stage, just like a ‘Megachurch’ preacher doing a gig (season 2, episode 8).
Lauded for his refreshing take on the Word Incarnate, Roumie’s Jesus respects ‘different creeds’ (season 3, episode 8), quips that working miracles on the Sabbath is ‘more fun’ (season 2, episode 6) and, when Andrew calls a sacrifice to demons ‘an abomination’, he drily responds, ‘That’s a pretty strong word, Andrew.’ (season 4, episode 1). This incidentally, forms the mise-en-scène for Jesus conferring on Simon the name ‘Rock’ after his confession of Jesus as ‘Son of the living God’. Jesus then confers the power to bind and loose on everyone present, including Mary Madgalene and an Ethiopean lady disciple, who plays a significant supporting role throughout the series.
Attempts to characterise Jesus’ humility often make him appear unapt to help others — ‘Simon has a few things he has to work out himself.’ (season 3, episode 4) — and effectively just one poor creature among others rather than the way the truth and the life. He frequently jokes and bumbles, feigning forgetfulness and manifesting apparently genuine non-comprehension. He often breaks moments of solemnity and high drama from the Gospels with the same use of irony and anticlimax which was, in bygone days, a means of subverting the audience’s expectations but which has paradoxically become a staple of drama which fears losing the audience through an excess of sincerity. Just as frequent is hugging, which the apostles seem to take as essential to Jesus’ teaching and a panacea for all their spiritual ills — ‘Seems we don’t do that enough,’ says Peter to James and John after another group hug (season 4, episode 4).
The ambitious scope of the series means that dramatisations of key moments from the Gospels are finely dispersed in a solution of much good dramatic writing and much which is less good — sometimes reminiscent of soap-opera melodramas. Peter is struggling in his marriage and in his ‘job’ (sic), until the first miraculous draught of fishes allows him to settle his debts (season 1, episode 4). There are many intimate moments between Peter and his wife, Eden (sic); at one point he says to her that ‘it’s time’ for them to have children! Then what were they doing before? (season 3, episode 2). Over the ‘seasons’, these totally fictional elements intertwine more and more with the scriptural content, like tares in wheat, until the latter effectively becomes the context of the former. An egregious example of this is Thomas’s girlfriend (sic), who — we make no apologies for spoilers — is killed in the most outrageously contrived and telegraphed way possible, resolving a fruitless (more-than-sub-)plot in a way that suggests even the writers repented of it. But it doesn’t end there! Entire hours of subsequent episodes revolve around Thomas’ disordered grief and pop-psychiatry mollycoddling by Jesus and the other apostles. This is the context of the above-mentioned group hug and also the principal subtext for the raising of Lazarus, which pushes Thomas over the edge, twisting his ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him’ (Jn 11:16) into an explicit death-wish (season 4, episode 7). Accesses of affectivity, which are key to the tone of the series, and presumably supposed to make the characters ‘relatable’ and the drama more ‘human’, are targeted at the immature and emotionally susceptible. Roumie’s Jesus emotes so much and so often as to suggest that dignity is not a perfection (or else is one he somehow lacks); it also empties of significance those moments of the Gospel in which Our Lord does manifest His emotion; Roumie in fact tears up less at the death of Lazarus than he does at other times for no clear reason.
The good intentions of The Chosen as a media project are undermined by the medium itself, because its finality is entertainment. ‘The electronic Jesus’2 presented by the series, like a hustler preacher, must entertain to survive. Because our ‘happiness does not consist in amusement’ but in our being created ‘to know, love and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next’, any foray into a virtual unreality where these distinctions are blurred will inevitably be something retrograde. But there are bigger problems.
To be continued.
This article is greatly indebted to the article ‘La série « The Chosen » (l’Elu) doit être vue avec discernement’ by M. l’abbé Claude Pellouchoud, which appeared in Le Rocher (no. 142, April–May 2023).
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