The Chosen, VidAngel’s record setting series about the life of Jesus. Is it yet another in a long line of poorly produced, cringe-inducing Christian media, or is this one something different? Well, that’s the answer you’ve been searching for. I’m Joel Fieri, president of Christian Podcast Central. Stay tuned.
In our research on what you, the Christian Podcast listener want to hear discussed in Christian Podcast, we found a desire for a review of the miniseries, The Chosen. And this is put on by VidAngel. It set all kinds of fundraising records. And as you might’ve guessed, I’ve watched it. I’ve watched season one and I want to share my thoughts with you on it. Now, being an amateur movie reviewer or TV reviewer, this is my first one actually, I’m just going to divide it up into what I typically look for whenever I’m watching a new show. There’s four areas that I picked. The first area is the writing. Second area is the casting. The third area is the acting performances. And for the fourth area, I’m going to talk about the goals of the show. Did they accomplish what they set out to do?
First off, the writing. The writing on The Chosen is good, I was going to say very good. They’ve done something very interesting, a couple of things, very interesting. They’ve given backstories to some of Jesus’s miracles and some of his teachings. They’ve given backstories to some of the disciples. One is kind of far-fetched, but for the most part, I think what the writers did is they thought beyond the biblical text. Now a lot of people don’t like that, but if you actually look at the biblical text, there’s really not enough in the gospels for a full episode of dialogue and storyline. So what the writers did it seems to me was they thought, well, what would make the fishermen stay up all night fishing? Or what was the lead up to the wedding?
Why did they run out of wine at the wedding? Whose wedding was it? And like I said, it’s extra biblical. If you’re one of those people that only likes when they stay precisely to the biblical writings, you won’t like that, but I liked it. But the thing I like most about the writing is they refer back to the Old Testament. In some of the episodes, some of the instances of Jesus’s life, some of the miracles he performed, or some of the people he came in contact with, they tied it back to the Old Testament, which I think is a message the writers are sending saying, guess what? The Old Testament is important. You can’t unhitch from the Old Testament. Otherwise, what Jesus said and did doesn’t mean anything.
So in a couple of the episodes, we get to see Jacob and we get to see Moses, and we get to see Joshua. So the writing I’m going to say is pretty good. The one weakness would be maybe the backstory is a little contrived, but that’s being kind of nitpicky on that. The casting. The casting is very good. Everybody looks the part. Jesus, obviously the most important casting decision, they didn’t cast a pretty boy, Jim Caviezel type. He looks like a middle Eastern guy, a carpenter. He’s tall, but that’s about it. He definitely does not look like the pasty face picture, old picture of Jesus in the back of the church where he almost looks feminine. So they did a good job casting Jesus, everybody else I think is really well cast.
Everybody looks the part. They look like middle Eastern Jewish people. The Romans look like Roman soldiers. So the casting was good. I was going to say casting is very good. The performances I’m going to say are superb. I was really impressed. As I said in my intro, I’ve seen too much really poorly produced cringe-inducing Christian media, and acting performances, and bad writing, the acting performances in The Chosen are very good. I can’t think of a single person that is bringing down the production with a bad acting performance. Two in particular stand out to me that I think are just outstanding. The first is Nicodemus.
The actor they got to play Nicodemus, I recognize him from… I’m thinking he is law and order because he just has the look of a guy who has been on law and order, but he’s an older actor and he just does a fantastic job of playing Nicodemus as a truth-seeking Pharisee who still holds to the traditions and the laws that the Pharisees are laying down. But he hasn’t gotten so far into that that he’s close to the possibility that God might be doing something through this new teacher. And the scene with him and Jesus, the John 3:16 scene is fantastic. You need to see it. But by far the best performance I think given this is Matthew. The writing and the acting on the character of Matthew is something I’ve never seen and was not expecting.
They, again, the writers put a lot of thought into Matthew. What would a Jew at that time who was a tax collector for the Romans, the hated Romans, which meant he was hated by his family, everybody around him. What would make someone do that? What would his personality be? What would his motivations be? And the actor playing Matthew is outstanding. And he’s by far my favorite character. He’s the most interesting character in it. Why they picked Matthew, I don’t know, but it was… Matthew is a home run. I really like that character. But as I said, everybody is good. The Roman soldiers are really well-played, the praetorian, whoever, the head guy at Roman is also a very interesting character. Mary’s good. Peter is good. Andrew, everybody gives a really solid performance.
And finally, for the goals of the show, if the only goal of the show was to be, hey, we’re going to do quality Christian media, I say, amen, thank you Lord. They did it. They really met that goal. And I think a big reason for that is they set records in their fundraising. And that goes to the lesson we all should learn. If we want good Christian media, we need people to step up and fund it. If you raise enough money, if you have enough budget, there are really creative people who will put on a good show for you. So if it was only for that, I’d say that they met their goal. I don’t know how evangelistic they want to be. The theme of the show and some of the things, they’re staying very faithful to the gospels, very faithful to the message of Jesus.
As I said, there’s a lot of extra biblical stuff. And I said if you don’t like that kind of thing, you probably won’t like this show. But it is quality and it is being talked about. It’s getting good reviews. So hopefully that means non-Christian people are watching. And if they are watching, they’re staying close enough to the message of Jesus and the message of the Bible to where I think they might even be meeting that goal. And hopefully that is their goal. That should be the goal of all Christian media. So as you can tell, I like The Chosen. I really liked it. And I highly recommend it. I’m going to give it four and a half, not stars. I’m going to give it four and a half Bible ribbon bookmarks. How is that? That’s my new symbol. But as this is probably my only video review, that’ll have to be it.
Watch The Chosen and contribute. From what I’ve seen, they are getting a massive amount of funding for season two. So obviously a lot of people like it and want to see more. I like it. I want to see more. I think you will too. For next week, we’re going to tackle another question that you have been searching for, and hopefully we’ll have the answers. As usual, follow us, like us, subscribe, comment on YouTube. Look us up on Spotify, Apple and all those other podcast platforms. Most of all, please go to our website, christianpodcastcentral.com for more content like this. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.