First, the show has a great cast, plays out on beautiful locations and has terrific production values. When it's hits, it hits hard, with big-picture faithfulness to the biblical witness and emotional beats that left me sobbing more than once. It also, unfortunately, embellishes the canonical story with fictional scenes that, I suppose, are intended to fill in gaps in the story and carry forward the parallel stories of Jesus, his followers and their families, the Roman authorities, and various Jewish people ranging from ambivalent supporters to deadly enemies of Jesus. Some of these extra scenes, more and more as the series goes on, feel to me like unnecessary padding and is sometimes downright dull, whereas the parts that emotionally grabbed me were pretty much all biblical material.
I gather this show started with a pilot that the creator, Dallas Jenkins, made as a video for his church, and the series developed from there, all crowd-funded. In a message Jenkins inserted into the Season 1 video set, he says he planned the show to get through Jesus' entire ministry, death and resurrection in eight seasons, but I think it's been trimmed down to seven seasons since then; five have been filmed so far.
The pilot, "The Shepherd," is a version of the Christmas story according to Luke 2, from the point of view of a lame shepherd who (in the film, not the gospel) is miraculously healed when the angels announce the Messiah's birth. I'd like it more if you actually saw and/or heard the angels' announcement. But you see a good deal of the potential for the series in this brief film.
Season 1 covers Jesus' ministry from healing the demon-possessed woman we will know as Mary Magdalene to Jesus' encounter with the woman at Jacob's well in Samaria. A broad thread running through this season's eight episodes is the Pharisee Nicodemus' recognition that Jesus is the Christ, which pays off with some of those powerful emotional moments I mentioned before. It also shows part of the process of Jesus' calling his 12 disciples, starting (when we first meet him) with "Little James" and Thaddeus, then collecting Andrew, Peter, "Big James" and John as well as Matthew the tax collector. It depicts some of Jesus' early, non-public miracles, such as healing Mary and filling the fishermen's nets, then moves on to his public miracles like changing water to wine at Cana (making a disciple of Thomas, a wine merchant) and healing the paralytic let down through the roof of Zebedee's house. It gives us Jesus' rooftop conference with Nicodemus (John 3), with his "For God so loved the world" statement and discussion of being born again, and he finally heals Simon (Peter)'s mother-in-law before leading his first half-dozen disciples to Samaria.
Like I said, the whole Nicodemus plot line sent me into fits of tears. Erick Avari, whom you may recall from such movies as Stargate, delivers a powerhouse performance as a man torn between following Jesus and remaining rooted in his scholarly position. Other cast members you may recognize are Yasmine Al-Bustami of NCIS: Hawai'i as Ramah, Thomas' woman friend and later fiance, Kirk B.R. Woller as Roman Centurion Gaius, Brandon Potter as the Roman praetor of Capernaum and Jonathan Roumie as Jesus, an actor I first spotted in Solo Mio; he also played an evangelist in Jesus Revolution.
In Season 2, Big James and John get their nickname "Sons of Thunder" when they ask Jesus to destroy some hostile Samaritans. Moving on from Samaria to Syria, Jesus makes disciples of Philip and Nathanael – the latter in another one of the scenes that gets me choked up. Conflict simmers between the disciples, particularly between Simon Peter and Matthew, whose background as a tax collector he particularly resents. In Jerusalem, Jesus heals another paralytic, the one who has spent years waiting for a chance to crawl into the Pool of Bethesda when its waters are stirred, and this gets the attention of Simon the Zealot, known as "Z" in this series and depicted as the second paralytic's estranged brother. Z, kind of a kung-fu disciple, follows Jesus and appoints himself as security chief.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned, a lot's going on among the Pharisees, with a couple of them investigating Jesus' activities and looking for a pretext to file charges against him. Their attitude in general seems to be to take offense at everything. I don't remmeber if it's in this season or not, but at one point a Hellenized Jew shows up at the temple to inform on Jesus and before he can get five words out of his mouth, the Pharisee questioning him gives him the what-for for wearing damask, a blended fabric, which isn't kosher. These stooges catch up with Jesus as he and his disciples are coming away from a big sermon and various miracles, and when one of them takes that hoity-toity tone with one of the witnesses, he shames them with a statement like, "He's healing us, and you're just tearing us down" – a moment that creates a spiritual crisis for one of the Pharisees, in what may be the most emotionally powerful non-canonical moment in the series.
Season 2 wraps up with preparations for Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, an occasion that brings Judas Iscariot into his circle. Season 3 introduces us to Jairus, a sympathetic synagogue offical whose daughter Jesus will eventually raise from the dead. Jesus sends the disciples out on a mission trip, two by two; he preaches at the synagogue in his hometown and is violently rejected by the townsfolk; he heals Veronica, the woman with a discharge of blood; he responsds to questioning by John the Baptist's disciples, offending the Pharisees once more; he heals a deaf-mute man; and he concludes the season by feeding the 5,000.
Season 4 depicts the birth and death of John the Baptist, with Paul Ben-Victor (Entourage, The Invisible Man) playing Herod. Simon confesses Jesus is the Christ and receives the name Peter. Richard Fancy, Elaine's boss on Seinfeld, appears as Caiaphas the high priest. Matthew and Peter are reconciled. Jesus heals the man born blind, but when the local praetor goes spare during a small-scale riot and stabs Ramah, Jesus doesn't heal her; her death becomes a sore point with Thomas. Jesus begins foretelling his death, and he heals the new praetor's (previously a centurion) son. Judas starts pilfering from the disciples' funds. After visiting Lazarus, Mary and Martha at Bethany, the group barely escapes being stoned in Jerusalem. They travel back to Bethany for Jesus to raise Lazarus from the dead, further upsetting Thomas. Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus' feet with costly perfume, which causes a Pharisee who earlier started sympathizing with Jesus to break with him and hardens Judas' resolve to betray him; and with a bit of preparation, Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey.
So far, season 1-4 of The Chosen. I've left out an awful lot, but this is enough of a synopsis to give you an idea of how the show is progressing. It looks like Season 5 stretches out Passion Week from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on Sunday to his arrest in the garden on Thursday across eight episodes, which further suggests that Season 6 will be eight hours of Jesus' being tried, crucified and buried and Season 7 will cover from his resurrection to his ascension.
Whether or not it turns out that way, I have no complaints about the show except that, increasingly as it progresses, the plot drags as supplementary material is added to the biblically witnessed teachings and works of Jesus. My complaint isn't that it's doctrinally incorrect or tonally out of whack, just that it gets a little boring when it isn't laser-focused on what Jesus did and said – for when that focus is there, it's dynamite. Nicodemus' tears as he hid around the corner, at the end of Season 1, declining to follow Jesus on his travels, and the way Shmuel the Pharisee's world drops out from beneath his feet when Leander (I think that's his name) rebukes him for tearing down when Jesus is building up, are two exceptions – cases when something the show reads into the narrative hit hard. There's so much biblical material and I think focusing on that would be more to the show's advantage when it's actually the most gripping stuff.
Three Things That Made It For Me, as a TV dramatization: (1) Matthew being depicted as more or less Charlie Eppes from Numb3rs, with some additional OCD tics and possible signs of being on the autism spectrum; his characterization is a highlight of this fictionalization, with character growth as he breaks with his Roman protector, reconciles with his estranged parents, reconnects with his faith and becomes an evangelist. (2) John, also an evangelist, depicted as working out the opening of his gospel while sitting shiva for his brother, Big James. (3) Little James, depicted as suffering from a partial paralysis that Jesus never heals, and learning to bear this affliction faithfully despite the evidence all around him that he could indeed be healed. Yeah, yeah, there's a love story between Simon and his wife, and there's all the drama surrounding Thomas and Ramah, and of course I love the Nicodemus storyline in Season 1, and Z asking after Simon becomes Peter if that means he can have his name back and everybody in unison answering, "No," is legit hilarious; these are touches that show that faithfulness and a vivid imagination need not be kept apart. But sometimes the faithfulness is moving in and of itself.
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