Season 5 of The Chosen is vivid: bright fabrics and flowers, fountains and palms, glugs of olive oil and wine, the gleam and clatter of silver pieces, and the blood of butchered animals pooling in straw. The snap of unleavened bread. The flicker of candlelight. The scent of perfume, bought at great price and poured with abandon over Jesus’ feet. Some of the Roman costumes look chintzy. There’s a fog machine in the Garden of Gethsemane. But these misses are the exception, not the rule. It’s a very pretty show. It looks nice on the big screen, where it’s playing through Easter Sunday, April 20, before coming to Amazon Prime in June.
Season 5 of The Chosen is also artful. It’s historically sensitive and structurally inventive; each episode begins with out-of-sequence scenes from the Last Supper, then returns to chronological storytelling from Palm Sunday through Gethsemane. Flashbacks detail the disciples’ backstories: James the cantor and Nathaniel the architect and Simon the Zealot. Old Testament references abound. We see the clattering dry bones of Ezekiel, Abraham leading his son to slaughter, and David singing a psalm. The women in Jesus’ life honor him with a Dayenu, a song traditionally sung during a Passover seder. No Marcionism here.
Admittedly, The Chosen is sometimes a little on the nose. This season of the enormously popular dramatization of the Gospels—crowdfunded by adoring fans, set for two more seasons of prestige television after this one—is no exception, though it’s hard to give the writers too much grief for that. When dialogue has to explain Messianic prophecy and Passover rituals and the triangulated authority of Pilate, Herod, and Caiphas and preach the gospel in modern-day parlance, it’s no wonder it’s at times a bit artificial.
See Philip, exegeting Jesus’ table-flipping and whipping at the temple: “It was an assault on the wrong version of our system of worship and sacrifice.” See Herod, parsing the power structure: “I’m the one saddled with the onerous task of mediating the balance of power between the temple and Rome.” See Jesus, convincing Thaddeus to follow him: “You will have said yes to the world’s no.”
The show is thick with Scripture, including the lengthy Farewell Discourses from Jesus in the Gospel of John. But there’s also humor (“I’ll hold for the joke,” Jesus quips after revealing his Nazarene origins) and modern-day colloquialisms (“People have been eating it up,” Peter boasts of his own preaching) and poetic little phrases. The case against Jesus is “thinner than a silk strand.” The city has a “messianic fever” that needs to cool. A “small militia of malcontents” is stirring up the crowds. Jesus, insists Pilate, is “singular.”
This mishmash is a creative choice. It mostly works (but not always), as does the acting, which is mostly great (wide-eyed John and wry Herod, nervous Matthew and heroic Mary Magdalene, Nicodemus with his scrolls and, above all, Jesus) yet sometimes falls flat. Pilate’s flair is fun, though often feels more suited for the stage; Gaius is earnest but somehow unbelievable.
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Sets, costumes, scripts, structure: All matter. But mostly, season 5 of The Chosen succeeds because it’s telling a really good story.
Well, of course.
Of course! The story at the heart of our faith is good, and not just in the sense of entertaining, though it’s certainly that. Season 5 is where we approach the crux (pun intended) of the action. A king enters a city on a donkey, palms aflutter. By the end of the season, he’s betrayed with a kiss, sold out for coins—“the price of a slave,” as Judas puts it. There are the machinations of high political drama, the breast beating of classical tragedy, and again and again, stunning irony: the Messiah himself washing feet as his disciples protest, tears gleaming in their eyes. Those disciples swearing loyalty and yet dozing off to sleep.
It’s a good story because it’s got momentum and intrigue and complex characters but, most of all, because it’s good. It’s good news for us that Jesus is washing feet and doing the Father’s will, even as he digs his fingernails into rocks and doubles over in sorrow, sweat beading his brow.
You simply must give The Chosen team credit for how clearly this goodness comes through— Jesus’ humility, Jesus’ devotion to the Father, Jesus’ ringing pronouncements in the temple square. Both anecdotally and as measured by the show’s sheer success, audiences can’t help but feel it. A colleague told me that in her local movie theater, when Jesus chastises the disciples—“Will you just please do as I say and not object, for once?”—women in the audience shouted, “Amen!”
As annoying as I found the pitch for branded hoodies and mugs that opened the theatrical screening and as skeptical as I am about some of the franchise’s upcoming spinoffs—Bear Grylls!—and, yes, amid all those debates about Latter-day Saints influence and a pride flag on set and Scriptural embellishment, I’m convinced this is an earnest show, created out of love for the gospel and a desire to share it with others. I walked out of that theater more a believer in Jesus, and (for now) a believer in this show, a conversion experience I share with other critics.
It’s such a good story. But it’s not an easy one.
And to The Chosen’s credit, it doesn’t pretend otherwise. By season 5, the miraculous healings are mostly done; this is a time for hard teachings. Why these particular people, eating pomegranates and saying prayers, in this time and this place? What about the families of the moneychangers in the temple? Didn’t they need to eat? Why the almost nonsensical randomness that leads to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion? So many reluctant men, passing the buck to each other.
Then there are the big questions: Why does God alleviate suffering for some and not others? It’s a question the show makes explicit in the character of Little James, and in a miscarriage, and in an invented plot line about Thomas’s fiancée, whom Jesus refuses to raise from the dead. That plot line gives me pause, as it gave others too.
The other big question for season 5: Why does Judas betray Jesus? Producer Dallas Jenkins has already started addressing this season’s treatment of the most mysterious disciple; to my mind, these episodes offer a few different interpretations for his decision. Disillusionment? Greed? Possession? (Pay attention to a roll of his eyes and a clench of his jaw.) “You and I are not the same,” Judas insists to Caiphas as he makes his backroom deal. Judas thinks Jesus is the Messiah, he says. But “I suppose I have not seen enough.”
Why do I find myself feeling sorry for the last of the Iscariots as he plants that kiss?
The Chosen hasn’t suppressed these kinds of complications, and that’s part of its success as an artwork. This show is trying so hard not to be propaganda. That said, it does have a theology to impart, and it’s started to get at some answers through prophecy and snippets of theodicy and assurances of love from Jesus. But it’s too early to pass judgment on how the show will tackle the problems of pain and betrayal, of which so much theology has been written, in the episodes that remain.
“Oh my God,” exclaimed an audience member, shaken by the season’s final scene, in my movie theater as the finale credits rolled. I laughed out loud. More irony.
But I also found her outburst telling. Of course she knew what would happen next, right? The news really is good. Just wait for season 7.
But that’s the thing about a good story. Even when you’ve heard it a thousand times, you’re moved, again and again. You can’t wait to see what happens next.
Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.
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