The Chosen

 

Photo and caption from Deseret News

We started watching the most buzz-y Gospel television series, well, ever.

Sometime last spring, I made a guest appearance at a meeting of our parish's pastoral council to pitch an idea I had, to spin up a new ministry for young adults.  My thought was: we'd invite all the young adults in the parish to get together periodically and do fun and spiritual things.  The council members asked me what sorts of activities I envisioned, so I shared a few top-of-mind ideas: we'd do some prayer and spirituality; we'd find some service projects like food bank volunteering or Habitat for Humanity; and perhaps we'd watch some films and then have discussions about them afterward.

That last idea seemed to fire up my pastor.  He said, "You could show them The Chosen, and have discussions about it."  I replied, "Um, maybe".  Truth be told, at that time I didn't know what The Chosen was, although I thought I had vaguely heard of it.  Pre-pandemic, our parish had tried out a video-based program called Alpha which is geared toward building up a parish community, so I assumed The Chosen was another, similar parish religious-ed program.  My response to the pastor was a bit lukewarm because I didn't want to subject the young adults to religious indoctrination.  My idea was that we'd watch films made for mainstream theatrical release that were about relationships or finding your way through life or some other topics and themes that might resonate with young adults.  And then maybe we'd try to connect them with our faith.

It turned out that my youth-ministry idea was superfluous: not long after that meeting, a couple of dozen young adults in the parish who had graduated from college in the last 2-3 years got themselves organized and launched their own young adult ministry, independently of (and oblivious to) my idea to do the same.  So for the young-adult group ministry, I'm standing aside and not getting in their way; they seem to be doing just fine without me.

But that wasn't the last I heard of The Chosen.  A week or two after the meeting, I spent some time with our other parish deacon, a retired (but active and energetic!) guy some 20 or so years my senior, and he filled me in on The Chosen.  It's a television series, a dramatization of the Gospel stories.  Of course, there are a number of famous feature-length films about the life of Christ, but The Chosen bills itself as the first-ever television series about the Gospels.  It's also notable for being entirely crowd-sourced, which I assume means the producers got their funding more or less the same way Bernie Sanders has funded his presidential campaigns, via lots of small donations over the Internet from many people.

This other deacon is anything but lukewarm about The Chosen: he thinks it's terrific.  He and his wife watched the first season, and I believe the second season has dropped now, too.  I understand the writers are taking their time to work through the Gospel stories, and several more seasons are planned.  It's available on several streaming services (including on YouTube - you can simply launch YouTube and search for "The Chosen", and the search results will return full-length episodes), and also can be watched directly from the show's website.  I've read there also is an app available to view it.

As spring turned into summer, I kept hearing about The Chosen from other people.  The Chicago Archdiocese deacons had our triennial convocation in June, so hundreds of us were together for a long weekend, and several deacon couples we dined with were every bit as enthusiastic about the series as the guy at my parish.

Around the same time, one of our parish staff members organized some viewing sessions for parishioners to get together to watch The Chosen.  She offered a daytime series and an evening series.  She has run parish Bible study series for many years, and has a bit of a following, but it seems her series to show and discuss The Chosen has broken her attendance records.   Over a hundred people registered for the first season series.  She's now taking registrations for a fall series to show the second season, and it seems she'll equal or exceed her attendance from the first season.

So, if it's possible for a Christian television series to have buzz, The Chosen seems to have buzz.  (And it is possible: if your children or grandchildren were at the right age when the Veggie Tales animated children's films were being released, you know buzz is possible for this Christian content stuff.)  

Despite all the positive word-of-mouth, I confess to a certain reluctance to watching The Chosen.  As a general rule, I don't watch religious content on television.  I never, ever turn on EWTN or any of the Evangelical cable networks.  

But after hearing all the "you gotta watch this!" advice from friends and acquaintances, my curiosity was piqued.  What's more, I have a certain professional/ministerial obligation: if this series is making an impression on our parishioners, it's good for me to be familiar with it.  (As an aside, it interests me that our parishioners do hear about this stuff: pretty clearly, many of them were much more tuned into the series buzz than I was.  I don't know what networks of family/friends/neighbors they are plugged into which allows them to learn about this stuff, but apparently I'm not plugged into the same sources.  Maybe Facebook accounts for some of it; I'm not much of a Facebook user.)

My wife also had become mildly interested in watching the series.  So we kept telling one another we'd start it soon, and then promptly forget and watch something else. 

But tonight, we started it.  We watched Season 1, Episode 1.  It's...not awful.  Its production values are pretty okay, and the performances weren't too bad, but the first episode was a little slow.  The initial episode was all back-story of secondary characters (Mary Magdalene, Peter and Andrew, Nicodemus, and a young tax collector whose identity I haven't pegged yet - the Rich Young Man?  Zacchaeus?  My wife's guess is Matthew the tax collector), well-informed by biblical content and scholarship, but fictionalized, i.e. they made up a ton of stuff.  

It's probably not ideal for me to try something new on a Friday night, because I'm pretty brain dead from the work week.  Not to put too fine a point on it:  during the episode, I fell asleep briefly twice or thrice.  

We'll keep powering through it, unless it gets to be unwatchable.

What about you?  Have you checked out The Chosen?  What do you think of it?