I dismissed it the first couple of times I heard about it. With so much media available that is intended to be faithful, I doubted that the TV series, The Chosen, would appeal to me.
But then I watched an episode and then read an article by Chris Deville in The Atlantic titled, “Christian America’s Must-See TV Show.”
Here’s what you need to know about the series that we will be showcasing at 6:00 PM on the evenings when we gather in the Mission and Fellowship Center for ‘First Wednesday.’
First, The Chosen is a TV series about Jesus and his followers. Unlike many depictions of Jesus that we’ve seen through the years that make it feel like a figurine of Jesus has come to life and begun to speak in King James’ English, the Jesus that we meet in The Chosen feels more authentic and down to earth. According to Deville in his article published in The Atlantic, the Jesus that we meet in the series feels like “someone you’d actually like to hang out with, projecting divine gravity accented with easygoing warmth. He cracks jokes; he dances at parties.
“What The Chosen has done well is give us kind of a robust portrait of a highly relatable Jesus that moves beyond some of the holier-than-thou, untouchable, unapproachable portraits of Jesus in the past,” says Terence Berry, the COO of the Wedgwood Circle, an investment group that finances faith-based media.”
Second, The Chosen makes for some pretty good TV. Watched nearly 270 million times since its premiere, the crowdfunded series is preparing for its third season. As we well know, there are a lot of stories to tell about Jesus and his followers. Think of the first season of The Chosen as a slow-burn introduction to an epic we know and love.
Deville puts it this way: “Take it from a critic and a Christian with an aversion to Christian entertainment: The show is good. I’d stop short of calling The Chosen a prestige drama, but it looks and feels downright secular. Despite a wonky accent here and there, the acting is as strong as you’d see on a mainstream network series such as Friday Night Lights or This Is Us…Rather than merely reciting Jesus’s greatest hits, Jenkins and his writers linger with characters in their daily lives—marital and professional conflicts, financial struggles, campfire gatherings. When the audience sees climactic moments from the Gospels, such as Jesus’s miraculous healing of a leper, the events register as disruptions of the status quo.”
Third, The Chosen is faithful to the witness of scripture. The Gospels recount the story of Jesus and his followers through Jesus’s teachings, the storytelling he employs, and the circumstances in which we see him. We know that the Gospels do not tell one uninterrupted, comprehensive story. Instead, we have a collection of pericopes that the Gospel writers linked together to give readers a thumbnail sketch of all that Jesus did in this world. As a result, students of the scriptures must balance zooming into the text with zooming out of the text to see God at work in the in-between moments not explicitly identified in scripture.
The director of The Chosen says, “We’re just trying to build a show around the Bible and tell stories that we think are compelling.” Deville adds, “As a viewer who grew up attending church and has made studying scripture a central part of my adult life, I’ve found this approach consistently rewarding. Watching The Chosen is no substitute for reading the Bible—a disclaimer at the start of Season 1 even says “viewers are encouraged to read the Gospel.” But by putting another layer of human perspective between its viewers and its source material, The Chosen performs some of the functions of a good Bible teacher, providing cultural context for ancient events and probing viewers to empathize with the characters.
No, watching an episode or two of The Chosen is no substitute for reading the Bible. But the show may compel us to return to the scriptures with a newfound zeal for hearing God’s Word. When we do Bible study, we first seek to determine what the scriptures meant in their original intention. Once we have done that, we then seek to determine what the scriptures mean for us today. The Chosen can help us to hear familiar stories from the Gospels in a way that we may not have heard before.
This Wednesday, September 1, let’s tune in together and watch the first episode of The Chosen together at 6:00 PM in the Mission and Fellowship Center. I’ll be curious to hear what you think. Who knows? Maybe Jesus will show up, too.
“Christian America’s Must-See TV Show,” by Chris Deville, was published in The Atlantic on June 27, 2021.