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But I mean, is it any good? “The Chosen,” I mean—the blisteringly popular TV series about the life of Christ and his disciples: Is it?
Or, more to the point, for Catholics. I mean, is it good and appropriate television fare, truly right and just, wise, thoughtful, replete with sound and nuanced theology for us, with all our discriminating taste and high artistic tradition and, you know, the Sistine Chapel and everything: Is “The Chosen” worth our precious, Michelangelic time?
“The Chosen” not only renders the stories of the Gospels for the small screen, but also imagines the backstories to them: Magdalene’s conversion, the fish overwhelming Peter’s nets, the call of Matthew.... “The Chosen” is also the show that has launched the career of a once little-known Catholic actor named Jonathan Roumie into worldwide fame as Jesus.
(Mr. Roumie himself said, in an interview with America, that when it comes to the question of salvific Christian art being worth your time or not: “You could have the key to salvation for people and exactly what to do to be saved and have the meaning of life encapsulated in a three-sentence index card, but if you bury that index card in a bucket of garbage, you’ve lost them.”)
“The Chosen” is an international phenomenon, and its producers have claimed that, over its four seasons since its launch in the spring of 2019, it has been seen on streaming platforms and the CW by more than 200 million viewers. (It is ramping up for Season 5, centered on Holy Week, to be released first in theaters on March 27). The show has been translated into 50 languages, and the producers claim that it has garnered 13 million social media followers. It has enticed thousands of fans from all over the world to pilgrimage to Utah and Texas for the privilege of being extras on the show. In March of last year, Brigham Young University hosted an academic conference solely focused on “The Chosen.”
“The Chosen” has hit a Christian evangelizing dreamscape whereby, it claims, 30 percent of its audience members are non-Christian.
Good Art
Sure, OK, all very nice, all this success. But, again, is it artistically good for us, with our Dante and Bernini and Raphael and Mauriac and Hopkins and Joyce and Flannery and all those Catholic, Jesus-movie-making greats: Zeffirelli, Scorsese, Gibson (or even Pasolini—not Catholic officially, but he grew up in Italy, so honorary)?
Is it at least made by someone like that? No. It is not made by a Catholic. “The Chosen” was created by…an evangelical. An evangelical guy with one of the most evangelical guy names you can get: Dallas. Dallas Jenkins, from St. Charles, Ill.
Sure, a Catholic priest is one of the religious advisers to the show (the Holy Cross priest who is the director of Family Theater Productions, David Guffey, C.S.C., of Santa Monica, Calif.). But nevertheless, as a Catholic you prepare to watch “The Chosen”—a show made neither by Martin S. from Little Italy, N.Y., nor Francisco Z. from Actual Italy, Italy, but by Dallas J. from the Midwest—and you plan to sniff at the show for, well, filmic evangelicalness. Clubbing one over the head with simplistic messages. The denuding of all nuance and complexity for the golden beams of Christic wisdom. The not-so-subtle reactionary agenda.
Where is the reactionary agenda, Dallas and your blisteringly popular TV show? Trot it out. We know it’s there!
And I mean, if it was good, if it was just really excellent, high quality, moving, poignant television, then why is it free? Because you can get “The Chosen” not only on Amazon Prime and Netflix but on thechosen.tv for free! Would they really give away something for free if it was any good?
Sure, part of the reason that the show airs for free is that “The Chosen” was crowdfunded, with an initial stake of $10.2 million by 16,000 donors in 2019. (The show used a provision in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2016 that allows entrepreneurs to offer financial dividends to “donors.” They’ve got business savvy, we can grant.)
And, yes, “The Chosen” went on to become what may be the most successful crowdfunded media project of all time. (Before “The Chosen” came along, the highest crowd-funded television show, at $5.8 million, was the 2017 revival of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” which is a tad funnier than the life of Jesus.) But “The Chosen” was successfully crowdfunded, surely, by simplistic reactionary Christians with Dallas-adjacent names (Cade, Hunter, Tammy) who go to swap meets and embed fruit in gelatin and who, when gathered for worship, use words like “victory” and “my walk” and, well, you know, those kinds of people, right?
And sure, you may have heard that “The Chosen” throws Catholics a bone and actually has a Virgin Mary. But it is highly doubtful that the Virgin Mary in “The Chosen” even says the rosary. Highly doubtful. You see the problematic nature of this TV series, Catholics? No rosary.
And then you actually watch “The Chosen.”
What ‘The Chosen’ Is Actually Like
In “The Chosen,” a follower of John the Baptist reports that “John calls money a social construct,” the kind of thing you might hear in a Bolshevik coffeehouse or an Occupy Wall Street camp.
In the show’s telling, Peter leaving his nets and following Christ does not mean that he has completely (and somewhat cruelly) abandoned his family. The man who has given up all to follow the Messiah still comes home every so often to his wife, like a soldier on leave.
In “The Chosen,” after his conversion, Matthew the tax collector is not instantly embraced and welcomed by the other disciples. He is still held under suspicion for being a collaborator with Rome and a traitor to the Israelites.
“The Chosen” brings up and handles with dispatch classic scriptural questions like: What does it mean that Christ will “bring a sword”? Why does Christ heal some people and not others? How might the women who contribute to his ministry have made their money? (In “The Chosen” they sell olive oil.)
Imagine staging “Hamlet” for a theater packed with devoted Shakespearean scholars, actors, directors and fans. All of them have their idea of how “Words, words, words” ought to be played, or “Get thee to a nunnery” or the raising of Yorick’s skull in the graveyard scene. A show about Christ is like “Hamlet,” but with stakes 1,000 times higher. Not many people have set the foundations of their very existence on good old Hamlet. But many have built their life on the rock of Christ. And they want to see him done right.
In an interview with Elizabeth Tabish, who plays Mary Magdalene on “The Chosen,” I remarked that the Christ the show portrays seems to upend preconceived notions and expectations viewers might have of him. “I love that there’s an anarchy in Jesus, right?” Ms. Tabish responded. “That really disregards all expectations and [Jesus] doesn’t apologize for the way he is.” She pointed out that Jesus’ attitude was: “I’m not here to change the things you expect me to change. I’m not going to get on a big horse with a sword. Like, that’s not what I want to say.”
At the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis last summer, I met a woman who said she came back to her Catholic faith “because of Bishop [Robert] Barron and ‘The Chosen.’” The tone she used indicated: Isn’t this how everyone comes back to the church, through “The Chosen?”
Deb De Rosa, a member of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Naperville, Ill., said that the Jesus in “The Chosen” is “simply adorable.” She said, “I like how the sets, costumes, etc., help us to visualize what it may have been like. I love the compassion that the characters emit. It’s so beautifully done.”
Hal Strickland, a management counselor based in New York who is obsessed with Flannery O’Connor and quotes people like Soren Kierkegaard and Carl Jung all the time, likes “The Chosen.” He loves “The Chosen.” He has watched every episode of “The Chosen” several times and talks about it all the time. “As someone who loves Christ, inherent to that is a love for the Gospel. As glorious as it is, it can be arcane,” Mr. Strickland said. “The gift ‘The Chosen’ has given us is accessibility. To the whole world of the Gospel.” He predicted that “in 50 years, people will be watching these episodes.”
But has Hal ever been to a swap meet? Does he even know what a swap meet is?
Dermot Sheehan, a student at Loyola University Maryland, is also a big fan of the show. “I was instantly captivated by ‘The Chosen’ because of the visuals it gave me,” he said. “It gave my relationship with Jesus a more personal feel. He felt more relatable. And so did the disciples.”
Dermot said it helped him see the disciples “as real people, struggling the same way I do.”
In another John the Baptist sequence in the show, Jesus gently chastises his cousin, who is about to excoriate Herod Antipas for marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias. “I understand it is against the law of Moses, but I’m here for bigger purposes than the breaking of rules,” Jesus says. “The romantic lives of rulers and kings has been and always will be of enormous fascination to people. It was covered at length in Torah. I didn’t see why you feel the need to focus on it now.” Do you really need to preach so much about sexual sins?
Upon returning from his mission to preach the Gospel to the Jews, the apostle “Little James” admitted: “I said things I don’t comprehend or live by—I felt a fraud,” something every preacher and missionary on earth who is honest with him or herself can probably identify with.
“The Chosen” opens up an entire thread of intriguing, cross-religious dialogue in a single, 30-second exchange between two disciples. Mary Magdalene chastises a new follower of Jesus, an Ethiopian named Tamar, for decorating her body with her family’s ornaments and jewels. It is tantamount to being a pagan or an animist, declares Mary. Tamar snaps back that wearing these jewels is not pagan; she is simply honoring her ancestors. In a wisp of time, the scene evokes the entire Chinese Rites controversy of the 16th-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci: Could new Christians in 16th- and 17th-century China still perform their ancient rituals of honoring their ancestors, or was it tantamount to idol worship?
In “The Chosen,” Jesus prepares for the Sermon on the Mount by speaking it aloud to the empty hills, as Matthew sits nearby and writes his words down. When the time for the sermon comes, the disciples create a stage with a fabric backdrop for Jesus to speak from, they hand out leaflets in the nearby towns and his mother chooses a suitable blue sash for him to wear at his big performance.
“The Chosen” employs complex, interwoven storylines, such as the two-part final episode of Season 3, centered on water and cleansing. The episode yokes together the repair of a sewage system, a woman with a flow of blood, a miscarriage, the feeding of the 5,000, Peter and a Roman centurion fixing the cistern, the ritual cleansing of both the woman with the flow of blood and the woman who miscarried, and another “ritual cleansing” for Peter in the Sea of Galilee after he walks on water, sinks in the sea and is rescued by Christ.
Scripture and Truth
“The Chosen” goes big, takes leaps of imagination, is not afraid to provoke its viewers, privileges holding “the mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet would put it, over the rigidity of simply sticking to perfectly accurate retellings of the Gospel.
Ms. Tabish said she has met women who were survivors of abuse or trafficking, and who were plagued with a deep sense of worthlessness, who strongly identify with the story arc of Mary Magdalene—in particular, with her despair. A despair which then goes on to “the happiest ending there is,” said Ms. Tabish. “And so for these women to have gone through their own traumas and recognize themselves and see themselves in Mary Magdalene? It’s just so beautiful to know what they have to look forward to in this story, too, and for themselves that there can be a very happy ending here.”
When I talked to himself, the man, “The Chosen”’s creator, Dallas Jenkins (Dallas! Evangelical! Reactionary! His dad co-wrote those intense “Left Behind” books!), he was straightforward and seemingly grounded (seemingly!) and sharp and ironic and kind of funny (and annoyingly broad-shouldered, good-looking, etc.) and, disappointingly, not really reactionary.
When asked about the creative approach to Scripture that “The Chosen” takes, Mr. Jenkins said what every artist who has ever created anything based on factual events says: “Our goal is to capture capital-T truth, which means that even if we don’t know if this event or this phrase was factual, it reflects the character and intentions of Jesus in the Gospels. It is something that God would see as, or that we would see as, plausible.”
Ever since his 2017 box-office failure with his Christian comedy “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone,” Mr. Jenkins said, he has moved beyond worrying about what other people think of his work. He appears to be what we might call in the Jesuits a “free man.” “When I do ‘The Chosen,’ I don’t think about that stuff anymore. I just try to tell the truth,” he said. He wants to tell “a truthful story that makes sense and is organic, and the Christian message doesn’t feel crowbarred into it out of the blue.”
“I’m just trying to make a great product that pleases God and is good entertainment.”
During the unveiling of her original “Last Supper” photos of “The Chosen” cast in New York mid-February, the renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, a self-proclaimed fan of “The Chosen,” described Mr. Jenkins as the artist who was “taking on” Christianity for this century in the way Leonardo da Vinci did in the 1500s. Annie Leibovitz! The utterly cool artistic icon. (The Polaroid of a nude John Lennon embracing Yoko Ono is perhaps her most famous picture and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.) Her! She! A fan! Not only of “The Chosen,” but of Dallas!
Over-Commercialized?
Okay, fine. But there are still things to critique, no?
“The Chosen” was initially distributed by Angel Studios, but after a dispute about revenues, it split from Angel and created its own studio, 5 & 2. In the offing for 5 & 2 are an animated series, “The Chosen Adventures,” to be released later this year. Also in the works are a limited series centered on Joseph, and another on Moses. 5 & 2 also plans to eventually release a show based on the Acts of the Apostles. There is already a “Chosen in the Wild” partnership with Bear Grylls, where the celebrity survivalist takes cast members of “The Chosen” out into the wild for conversation and adventure.
Has “The Chosen” started to believe its own hype (no matter if the hype is real)? Is “The Chosen” on its way to becoming an overextended, faith-based version of Marvel Studios? Is it scaling up its business too quickly but with possible diminishing returns on quality? Does it think it can catch lightning in a bottle again and again? (How many “Avengers” sequels and spin-offs have there been?)
And just look at merchandise on the thechosen.tv website. You can buy, among other items, “Follow Him” T-shirts, “People Must Know” T-shirts, “The Chosen” wall calendar, “The Chosen” waffle-knit beanie, an “Against the Current” gold bracelet, an “Against the Current” mustard zip hoodie and a “Cast Your Nets” card game. You can buy an (admittedly clever) “Sons of Thunder” T-shirt and sweatshirt, proclaiming “‘The Chosen Tour’—Sep. 6 Judaea, Sep. 8 Galilee, Sep. 10 Nazareth.” You can get a “Three Fish” phone wallet, stainless steel “Chosen” tumblers, a “Chosen” Bible study guide, a “Chosen” fishermen’s blend coffee, or a rubber wristband declaring “Binge Jesus.” The list goes on.
For the past two years, the producers have staged “Chosencons”—conventions including talks, panel discussions with creators and cast, musical performances, a ventriloquist—with 3,500 attendees in 2023 and 5,000 in 2024. Another is planned for this year.
Is “The Chosen” phenomenon on its way to becoming a kind of spiritual Nike, a juggernaut of religious marketing? Has it taken its popularity and tried to cash in on it in ways that can make it a bit ridiculous, just another big-time Christian ministry trumpeting its wares? “The Chosen” socks. Really? “The Chosen” beanie?
(For whatever it is worth, I made repeated requests for a follow-up interview with the public relations team for “The Chosen,” in an effort to engage these and other questions, but was never given one.)
Nevertheless, perhaps a Catholic could appreciate the show’s online marketing machine as a cyber version of a modern-day urban cathedral, one that relies on revenue from donations and gift shop sales—the rosaries, the medallions, the Catholic tchotchkes—to keep the boiler running and the lights on. As for the studio’s scaled-up plans—if they are making something people want and they can pull it off with the same efficacy the original show had, why not?
But OK, regardless of all that—regardless of all these positive comments and benefits of the doubt and Annie L., a Gen Z guy and Hal…nevertheless, clearly “The Chosen” is not worth your time because…because…something about gelatin…gelatin.... I like gelatin—even gelatin with fruit—raspberry Jell-O with bananas, for instance. And the thrift stores I go to are pretty much just permanent swap meets, right? And just a few days ago in a church talk I sincerely used the phrase Christ has won the victory.
OK, OK. Fine.
But have we answered the opening question of this whole article? Overall, as a thing, as a wholesale artistic enterprise in the tradition of the Catholic arts greats, is it, you know…?
Is it Good? Does It Matter?
To answer that, we have to travel to 119th and Pacific in Omaha, Neb., to a pizza place called Big Fred’s. Big Fred’s pizza is heavy on the cheese, and the salad is heavy on the oil (drenched, really). Friday nights after high school football games, Big Fred’s is packed. Saturday nights after college football games, packed. Tuesday nights after “Jeopardy,” packed. Big Fred’s is that pizza place. Everyone knows it; everyone goes there; it is a mile from my childhood home; I have been there 11,000 times. Big Fred’s is named after a guy named Fred and Fred was Big. It had, at one point, red shag carpet on its walls. What else is there to say?
One night my brother and I were about to take an out-of-town visitor to Big Fred’s. She asked us, So, is the pizza any good?
My brother Bob and I looked at each other. Silence. Is Big Fred’s good? We had never heard anyone, anywhere, ever, ask that question. Is the pizza good? “I’ve never even thought of that question,” said Bob. Is the pizza.... “I don’t know if the pizza is good,” he said. “It’s just...it’s Big Fred’s.” Is it good? What? Really? Who cares? We have no idea if it’s any good.It’s just where everyone goes. Get in the car.
Is “The Chosen” good, sublime even? Is it worth your aesthetically discriminating time, Catholics? Sure, you could make critiques on both the positives and the “growth edges” of the show. Acting, writing, directing, camera angles, lighting set-ups, art direction, all that. The whole deal. If I wanted to be quite plainspoken about it, I would have to say it pulls it off quite well. It is a strong piece of work. You can agree or not with the artistic choices the show makes, but it pulls off those choices effectively. “The Chosen” packs the proverbial emotional wallop.
But in the end, whether “The Chosen” is “good” or “not good,” is marvelous TV or not, is less important to me than this fact: I have been a baptized Christian for 53 years, attended a Catholic Christian grade school, high school, college and two graduate schools and for more than two decades have been a member of a religious order that bears the name of Jesus…and the “The Chosen” television series has done things for my understanding and engagement with the life of Christ and his disciples that nothing else ever has.
No sermon, no theological exhortation, no master’s degree, no class on John or Mark or Luke, no spirituality workshop, no 30-day biblically based retreat has brought the Gospels home and made Christ and his people real and relatable to me in quite the way “The Chosen” has. I think that is worth something.
“The Chosen” has simply become what is. It is a thing that has lodged itself in the culture that is here to stay. The proof is in the pudding: Millions of people, all over the world, are really into this show. And if a Catholic today—and in particular any kind of Catholic minister—is not present to “The Chosen,” then they are not present to an increasing number of their people. Because at some point everyone in the church, in one way or another, is going to engage with “The Chosen.”
I do not write this necessarily as free advertisement for the show, but as an advertisement for reality. Whether “The Chosen” is to your taste or not, it is time to pull up a chair and watch.
