What Is The Chosen? Part 1

Seriously, what is it?

Photo by Sebastian Pena Lambarri on Unsplash

Introduction: What is The Chosen?

The Chosen is a multi-season scripted television show that dramatizes the experiences of the twelve disciples and their associates during the ministry of Jesus. The Chosen is also an adaptation of an extant literary source – in this case, a really old source, and also of texts that many people receive as sacred scripture about a man they believe to be God. 

I would also add my opinion and that’s this: The Chosen is a really good show. In the field of Bible adaptations and Christian media (which usually tend towards the awful) it’s bordering on a masterpiece. It’s extremely well made. It looks fantastic. The vast majority of the performances are excellent. There are a number of creative decisions in the show that are shockingly clever and well staged. It’s frequently very funny. It’s also very moving. The world of the show feels lived in and approachable in a way Bible films often don’t. It’s really good television. 

Does that really answer the question? Maybe. It’s the definition of The Chosen I had in my head primarily when I watched the series – this is just a good show. I didn’t know the names of the actors, I didn’t learn anything about the production, I didn’t read about the historical research on this show – I just took the text of the show as it was, and as entertainment. And of course, I was particularly intrigued by this show because it was depicting events that are foundational to my faith, and adapting the book I got my doctorate in. 

But maybe that center was never going to hold. If I was the person who was determined to just watch The Chosen like House of the Dragon, the reality is that this was never the way that The Chosen was meant to be consumed. Media about Jesus is simply made for different motives and towards different ends than other movies, books, and television. Like a lot of Christian media, they’re often produced with the goal of promoting religious devotion in the audience. And classically speaking, The Chosen has all the hallmarks of classical Christian art that is intended to produce religious feelings in an audience. Our medieval forefathers got stained glass windows and the Oberammergau Passion. We get The Chosen. 

And again, in the most literal sense of the word, The Chosen is no longer just a show. It’s also a component of a sprawling series of Bible studies and sermon notes that are officially available online. It’s also available for licensing at churches, schools, non-profits, and prisons. It’s now funded through a massive nonprofit that is spearheading efforts to translate The Chosen into 600 languages and broadcast it all over the world.

And it’s also INTRODUCING THE WORLD TO JESUS, ONE EPISODE AT A TIME.

See?

I can only speak from my experience when I say that, I liked The Chosen a lot more before I started learning more about it. I got into this subject because I was curious about the highly public story of their big divorce with Angel Studios. And, of course, I was curious to learn more about some of the (non-biblical, I got the Bible stuff on lock) material in the show, and how they talked about it. Having watched dozens of hours of bonus content in addition to the show itself, I found myself feeling different about The Chosen than I did at the start.

Maybe it’s just always better to not know how the sausage gets made. Or what else is on the table with the sausage.

It remains true that I think the show itself is very good. I warmly recommend it to people who ask me about it. I enjoy watching it myself – it’s standard treadmill fare for me. But the more I looked into it, the more I started to wonder – why? Why do people give to The Chosen? Why do people apparently watch it dozens of times? What is this show? What’s up with the effort to broadcast it on the same level as Harry Potter? How do the people who make it think about it? What are the claims of historical accuracy doing for the show? Are they true? How does this all work?

I did my usual schtick of being the last millennial who will make phone calls and chasing down everyone I possibly could find who might talk to me and I got a very few small leads. But on the whole, no one from The Chosen would talk to me at all. (Seriously, it’s like a vault at Come and See. I have been told by so many people “why don’t you just ask the creators about these mistakes you’ve seen instead of criticizing them? Matthew 18!” You can’t. People vastly underestimate the size of this production and the size of the audience. I might as well try to call Anthony Hopkins and give him feedback on his last movie. These people are celebrities and they know it.) This cooled me off the process of trying to get interviews pretty completely – if I can’t get a line producer on the phone I definitely can’t get showrunner Dallas Jenkins or Jesus actor Jonathan Roumie to call me back. So this breakdown of The Chosen is almost entirely from publicly available information, because that’s what I had.

In Part 1 we’re going to look at the question “What is The Chosen?” through the perspective of the showrunner Dallas Jenkins, through the nonprofits and media that surround the show, and through the voices of the fandom. In Part 2 (I know, I’m the queen of starting series and not finishing them yet) we’ll look at the show’s claims about historical accuracy. 

Is The Chosen Just a Television Show?

It seems to me the most cautious and conservative claim a showrunner could make is this: The Chosen is not any different from Breaking Bad. The goal is to tell a story well that makes you think and introduces tough themes, and the fact that The Chosen is about Jesus doesn’t change that. If I was in Dallas Jenkins’s place, that is how I would talk about it. 

I would also argue that the fact that The Chosen is crowd-funded through a nonprofit doesn’t change that. Chris Stuckmann’s forthcoming horror movie Shelby Oaks was a crowdfunded project, but that doesn’t change the genre of Shelby Oaks. And lots of art exhibitions and projects are funded by nonprofits, like the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in beautiful Durham, NC. Producing art is itself a social good, and it makes sense that art would be funded through grants made by donor-based organizations. The Chosen is not inherently made a ministry project or an educational project by virtue of how it was made or funded. There is absolutely no reason why Dallas Jenkins can’t talk about The Chosen like it’s just a normal television show.

But I don’t think that is what Jenkins thinks his show is. There’s a real extent to which Dallas Jenkins clearly does think of this as a fundamentally different form of television than something like House of the Dragon. Dallas Jenkins talks about people who had “trusted in” the show but now feel like they can’t “trust” it, and it’s important for him to give people “tools” to “answer” people who don’t want to watch The Chosen. This sounds more like how one might talk about sermons or lectures than a TV show. Not being able to trust that what your pastor is saying is true is a big deal. Not being able to trust Mad Men is not. Likewise, as bonkers as online fandoms can be, HBO doesn’t produce apologetic tools to talk your friends into watching House of the Dragon at home. Either you like the show or you don’t.

The question of “can you trust The Chosen” also comes up here where Dallas Jenkins makes basically an affirmative case that yes, you can. It is not a replacement for the Bible and it’s not an addition to it, it’s just a show. But critically, it’s a show you can “trust.”

Jenkins here says that The Chosen is a narrative show, not documentary, and not a church or a ministry. But in the same video Jenkins emphasizes the hard work that people have put in to make The Chosen accessible all over the world and gives credit to people of different faiths who do this. I don’t begrudge Jenkins’s ecumenical impulses (the common complaint that non-Christians work on the show is, I think, one of the most widespread and least charitable complaints about the show) but it’s hard to imagine Vince Gilligan talking about the importance of getting Breaking Bad to every corner of the globe. Breaking Bad is really good and people should get to watch it. But it’s not a necessary social good to make Breaking Bad accessible in every part of the world – which again shows that Jenkins is clearly not thinking about this like a normal television show. It’s noticeable that Jenkins justifies hiring non-Christian crews on the grounds that it doesn’t matter who makes the leather that binds a Bible – the Bible is true whether the leather maker is Christian or not, he says. The analogue in his example is between The Chosen and the Bible, and the analogy is between distributing a Bible and distributing The Chosen. For an evangelical speaker that’s a claim that goes far beyond “I work really hard on this show and I think it’s good.” There’s a real extent to which he is assigning extreme religious significance to The Chosen, even as he acknowledges it’s not a literal Bible. It’s certainly like a Bible, at least according to this analogy, and it’s important to propagate it as though it was.

So it seems like exactly what The Chosen is, from the perspective of its creators, a real moving target. It’s not a documentary, but you can trust it. It’s a narrative show, but it’s important that it’s told all over the world. It’s entertainment, but here’s how to talk to your friends about it.

Dallas Jenkins talks in many reviews about people praying for the show, helping advance the show, bringing people to the show – in a way that makes it very clear that Jenkins absolutely thinks of this as a kind of religious text that can yield positive practical outcomes in the audience other than “enjoying it.”

Is The Chosen a Show or a Movement?

After The Chosen broke with Angel Studios, its production and distribution was fully taken over by a 501(c) called Come and See. The goal of Come and See is to grow the audience of The Chosen to a staggering one billion people (for comparison, about 200 million people saw Avengers: Endgame in theaters. The Chosen wants to be Avengers: Endgame times five). The show is currently being dubbed in 100 languages and subtitled in another 500, with the goal of being made available in a native language for 95 percent of the world population. For comparison, the Bible has been translated into about 700 languages.

The localization team of Come and See works with local communities to broadcast The Chosen in rural and remote settings, prisons, schools, and other organizations. For example, in 2023 Come and See collaborated with the president of Madagascar to screen The Chosen for 3,000 orphans. In a country where only one in three people have electricity, this was probably the first television show many of them had ever seen.

In other words, this has all the hallmarks of an evangelistic crusade or a tent revival. The point of giving to Come and See is not simply that The Chosen will get made. It’s so that The Chosen can reach a global audience and change people’s lives. The obvious analogy here is the Jesus Film Project, which is available in 2,100 languages and propagated by Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) as an evangelistic tool.

The Chosen is a pretty different animal from The Jesus Film, though. The Jesus Film is a fairly faithful adaptation of (primarily) the Gospel of Luke. It’s two hours long, and stays fairly close to the text of the one source it’s adapting – which spares it the difficulties of trying to fit together multiple Gospels. The Chosen, is, of course, not that at all – it’s a narrative show with massive sections of free adaptation from the Gospels, invented plots and subplots, and whole characters who never appear in the Gospels at all. From a traditional evangelical perspective, this makes The Chosen an odd choice for the subject of a tent revival. There are many, many sections of The Chosen (arguably, the bulk of the show’s run time) that have nothing to do with any particular passage from the Bible.

So it’s hard to argue that The Chosen is a natural update of The Jesus Film. It’s not even the same genre. Admittedly, The Jesus Film looks comparatively amateur and dated compared to The Chosen, but it’s definitely more analogous to historical evangelistic and tract movements than The Chosen is.

And while The Jesus Film is a true product of the 1970s, The Chosen is decidedly not – not just in tone and presentation but in the fact that it has turbo-charged online branding. You can see that the show is extremely into branding. The Chosen as a TV show doesn’t just feel extremely 2024. The marketing side does too. 

There’s the extremely prolific The Chosen TikTok and Instagram that provides behind-the-scenes access to screening and chats with actors – catering to a modern online craving for “authenticity.” There’s The Chosen logo and the distinctive teal color of its title cards and logos. The Chosen teal is so central to the show’s marketing that they even held their premier on a Chosen-teal carpet. And of course, all the show merch is available in teal.

There’s an emphasis on the hashtag #bingejesus in online promotion and merch - again, available in teal.

There’s The Chosen’s obvious love of catch phrases, presumably made with the goal of getting them to circulate online. (We can probably blame “I am the one who knocks!” or “I choose violence” for this impulse). Lines from the show are incorporated into the merch production.

The effort to give Jesus a catch phrase is clear from the t-shirt production side of things.

The is the most awkward shirt ever made.

Which Dallas Jenkins wears on the aftershow.

The Chosen executive producer Derral Eves has written extensively about the marketing strategy for the show in his book The Youtube Formula. Derral Branding, a devotee of the book Primalbranding, envisions the use of color, slogans, and a brand-centered culture to create zealous followers of a product. Critically, these zealous followers are required, because they have money. Eves talks in The Youtube Formula about targeting millennial and Gen X women specifically as an audience for The Chosen because they spend the most money online. The employment of TikToker Jalein Abania fits pretty well with this vision of The Chosen as an audience geared towards online women with money. I don’t begrudge the fact that The Chosen has to make money and get donors in order to exist, but the branding, the slogans, the viral marketing – this does sit strangely alongside the fact that the show has so many fans who are deeply, spiritually committed to it. The fans may experience themselves as worshippers of Jesus and readers of the Bible who are enjoying the experience of something that brings their faith to life but they are – first and foremost – customers. The Chosen is being sold to them as a product. You’re supposed to connect with the logo, the color, and the phrases, and give someone money for them. 

I appreciate that that’s how lots of things work in this world. I’m writing this across from a poster of The Exorcist, which my husband bought me because I love it, and because The Exorcist is really important to me as a religious and spiritual text. I acknowledge the film The Exorcist was made with the goal of making money, and it is still an important part of my identity. I accept the fact that we live in a world where art – even excellent art – is commodified, and money is required to make it. 

And yet, the lines between fan, supporter, donor, worshiper, customer, advertiser, fundraiser, and religious adherent all get quite blurry in this system. The goal of the fandom in this case does not seem to just be “for The Chosen to find its audience.” The marketing and production side does not seem to be intended to make fans to bring in money to keep making the show. It seems to be intended to make fans, to make more fans, to bring in more money, to make more fans, because of the perceived significance of this show having an enormous audience and broadcasting this show in more places. The model here is not that of a fandom culture. It’s much more like an evangelistic crusade. Where, yes – enormous amounts of money are being gathered and made. While he’s not exactly making Game of Thrones-ruining money, Dallas Jenkins’ salary in 2020 had climbed to over a million dollars. And that’s not a million dollars of ad revenue, video game licensing money, and subscriptions. That’s donor money, given by the fans.

So maybe it’s time to talk about the fans.

The Show’s Fans

If Dallas Jenkins isn’t experiencing The Chosen as just a television show, and his nonprofits aren’t pushing The Chosen like it’s just a show, they have nothing on the show’s fans. For whom the show is absolutely, 100 percent, not just a show. 

People have a really intense relationship with this show.

I pulled these from a fan page for The Chosen and you can see a sample here of the kind of fan discourse. Making the show is God’s work. Watching the show again and again is rewarding the way reading the Bible is. It makes people feel good and like they don’t want to watch anything else. 

I think Come and See and The Chosen encourage this kind of relationship. If you go to the website for Come and See the only way you can contact the team (outside of requesting a license or getting help with a product purchase) is a form where you can share your testimony about The Chosen. And, these testimonies are available through the website.

This is from Barbara’s Story, who encourages you to give to the show:

See the teal?

This is from Josie’s story, who was going through a dark season and found God The Chosen:

These aren’t crazy fans on a Facebook page, this is material that Come and See is curating and producing. This is how they want people to think about the show!

I appreciate that fandom is an intense cultural force and people really, really love what they love. But have you ever seen AMC produce content about how people in dark places got by through watching Better Call Saul?

I want to be fair in that this is far from the first time that people developed a strong sense of community and identity around a commercial product. But what makes this different from something like Marvel or Star Wars is that the fans mobilize around the sense that they can trust the show, that they learn from it, that it’s fundamentally good for them. It’s not that they enjoy it and it makes them happy – it’s that they support The Chosen because they believe people w ill benefit from exposure to The Chosen. 

A lot of this comes from the way in which The Chosen presents its relationship with history, historical accuracy, and the idea of “biblical truth.” Jenkins does not claim that show is perfect, but reading between the lines, it does seem that Jenkins feels as though the show is inspired in some way. Jenkins says that he felt God tell him that The Chosen would be “the definitive portrayal of (God’s) people” (presumably on screen, he means) and “(God’s) not going to let (Jenkins) screw it up.”

And this is a pretty tall order. It means that there’s a real extent to which Jenkins can’t admit when something might just be a bad choice for the narrative. And above all, it makes the show’s relationship with history a little strange.

I’ve dabbled a little in some of the online fandom communities and one thing that I’ve noticed is this: while some people are pretty amenable to talking about what they like and don’t like about the show, a lot of the fans absolutely are not. And some people get extremely stressed out when you suggest something in the show might not be historically accurate, unless that’s something that Dallas Jenkins et. al. openly agree isn’t true (e.g., Ramah and the murder). But if you suggest someone made a mistake, a lot of fans get REALLY pissed off. They point at the experts on the show, how carefully they treat the historical material, how much they’ve learned about history since the show started, and so on. 

For fans of the show, it’s okay that Dallas Jenkins and the team invent things. What is not okay is that Dallas Jenkins and the team got things wrong. The inventions have to be intentional. They cannot be accidents, or meaningful disagreement of history. God is not going to let Jenkins mess up on The Chosen. And the evidence for why the show is always accurate when it intends to be is the oft-touted and oft-cited historical team behind the show. 

So what do they do? Are the show’s only non-historicisms intentional? 

We’ll talk about that next time.