The Good Tube: The History Channel Does the Bible
by Henshaw
The Bible has been getting big ratings on The History Channel the past few weeks. Generally speaking, I’m a little weary of these types of TV events. Most entertainment pieces about the Bible have been bad. However, we’ve entered the renaissance of TV shows with HBO, AMC, FX, A&E, and other networks creating amazing TV. Maybe this will be better, I thought. So out of morbid curiosity I’ve been catching up on The Bible and so far I’m a bit stunned by how much it diverges from the text.
The show’s producers aren’t hiding the changes. There’s a disclaimer before each episode that says some changes have been made. I get it some things have to be moved around for it to work in this format. The biggest challenge in doing a TV drama on the Bible is the length. There’s just so much to cover and ultimately that’s the main problem with The Bible. The story is moving so fast that there’s no character development. Which means every dramatic part is a little comical.
For instance, when the angels visit Lot in Sodom and Gomorrha the city residents attack them. It’s not clear why, but by the time they arrive at Lot’s house they’re covered in blood. The angels tell Lot it’s time to find better real estate and they fight their way out of town. It’s an amazing spectacle watching the ninja angels fight their way out of town before hell fire rains down from above. Good TV? Perhaps, but that’s not the way I remember it.
In the Bible, when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to worship a nine-story golden image of Nebuchadnezzar they are condemned to be thrown into the furnace. In the History Channel’s The Bible they’re burned like witches for not bowing to Nebuchadnezzar. The man who protects them from the flames is some kind of massive fiery angel. This isn’t a big deal I guess, but why change it at all?
When the Virgin Mary gets pregnant there’s a bizarre conversation between her and Joseph about the pregnancy. She’s knocked up and he’s not the father. Joseph calls her a whore before he finally figures out the child is divine thanks to Maury Povich an angel who must have got stuck in Heavenly traffic. The list of examples goes on and on, but some of the choices the producers made are puzzling.
The show has been getting lots of media attention thanks to those big ratings. Instead of discussing the content of the show people are discussing whether or not Satan looks like Obama. No… really. There are literally thousands of articles but I’ll choose one to make my point. Lisa Suhay has penned an article for the ages. It has everything. She even mentions Nate Silver somehow.
What I have learned from the past five years of working with any and all kids and parents who live in predominantly African-American neighborhoods here in Norfolk, Va., is that color is an issue right down to which side of the chess board you choose to play. I stopped bringing black-and-white chess pieces to first-time chess sessions and substituted green versus gold and red versus blue because I could not get kids or adults to play white if they were a variant of brown themselves.
You might be asking yourself what this has to do with The History Channel or The Bible, but asking rational questions is dangerous these days. It seems the producers bent over backwards mixing in different races throughout the series. For example, Samson is depicted as a black man as are many of the angels. ??Historians would do a better job of shedding insight on what people looked like in that area of the world during the periods covered in the Bible. It doesn’t really matter. Western civilization conjured up the most recognizable version of Jesus. The Bible rarely described what people looked like because it’s completely irrelevant (Goliath being one notable exception). It’s creepy picturing Jesus as a Jeffrey Hunter look-alike or the guy from Person of Interest. Maybe the producers would have been better off casting Asians for all the parts.
Not content to only change chess tables, Lisa Suhay gets to the root of the Obama Satan/Obama controversy. The real culprit is Glenn Beck:
The actor chosen to portray Satan in History’s “The Bible” mini-series, Mohamen Mehdi Ouazani, was given the nasty moniker by TV pundit Glenn Beck, sparking a social media smack-down over the weekend. Thanks Mr. Beck, just what the world really needs right now, someone stealing the light from the Bible and shining it on hate, intolerance, and political agendas.
I thought Glenn Beck was gone? He’s still around? So all of this can be laid at Glenn Beck’s feet? If it’s a “nasty moniker” why did she dedicate an entire article to it? Certainly Glenn Beck isn’t the only person who made this observation. I’m not surprised he’d tweet something so ridiculous and I’m less surprised that people like Suhay feel compelled to bash The Bible over it. This kind of dog-chasing-its tail type of writing is maddening, but that’s what the internet does with everything. Meanwhile, The Bible gets big ratings and some people worry about chess boards and Glenn Beck.
Overall the The Bible is an ambitious effort. Ten hours doesn’t allow enough time to compress something as long and complicated as the Bible. It takes me a year to read the Bible from cover to cover thanks to a daily reader on the YouVersion app.
I realize that people don’t read the Bible as much as they used to (even regular churchgoers) so I’m glad people are watching The Bible in big numbers. The Word of God is powerful. Maybe some people will feel compelled to read the actual the Gospels. Perhaps producers will develop some shows with a narrower focus. The audience is there and there are some wonderful characters that are worth exploring. Or, maybe it’s time someone brings back Saved by the Bell.
” Joseph calls her a whore before he finally figures out the child is divine thanks to
Maury Povichan angel ”That alone was worth the read.Report
There’s a LOT of “hooooooor” calling (that’s how they’ve pronounced it so far) — but did you know that David had multiple wives and concubines? You won’t learn it from this program.
(We’re only up to the birth of Solomon, so no spoilers, please! LOL)Report
OK. But if things start to get ugly, remember that no babies were harmed in the filming of that episode.Report
“There’s a LOT of “hooooooor” calling (that’s how they’ve pronounced it so far) — but did you know that David had multiple wives and concubines? You won’t learn it from this program.”
Over at the blog ‘Slacktivist’, they ran a series on ‘Biblical marriage’, listing all of the different forms. That’s certainly a can of worms which they didn’t want to open.
The best summary of ‘Biblical marriage’ is ‘one man, and as many women as he can get'[1].
[1] Certain restrictions did apply, such as the religion of the women, and certain restrictions did not apply – rape and slavery were acceptable.Report
“How could you? You and I haven’t even …”
“And we’re not going to.”
“What, you mean until after the baby’s born?”
“No, never. My parents never did. I think. Mom was kind of unclear.”Report
They did; it just wasn’t messy.Report
Ah. And Mom felt inadequate.Report
That doesn’t sound like mom, perhaps the enunciation is confusing you?Report
I’ve been enjoying it as much for what it DOESN’T show as what it does. Men getting slaughtered in gory detail — fine and dandy. Women and children being killed in the same attack — don’t be silly! We can’t show THAT!
And David did not bring Saul “trophies” of the 2000 Philistines he killed.
A am enjoying how they’re mixing up the races. I’m curious: when the Philistine made a comment about “mixed marriages don’t work” (in show because because Samson was an Israelite and his wife was a Philistine; out of show because Samson was black and his wife was white), did you take that as the producers talking; or as “this is what an enemy says”?Report
See below, I take it as comfort for right-wing Evangelicals who might still be skeptical about Loving v. Virginia. In the CS-Monitor article, it is basically said that the show is for right-wing Evangelicals.Report
Which, it turns out, there is a huge market for if more networks cared to notice…Report
Huge Market yes but I still think is it huge enough to make up putting off and offending everyone else?
I am largely okay with right-wing Evangelicals having their own Shadow Culture if they leave the rest of us alone. There are a lot of them but 40 million is still not a majority in a country with 300 plus million.
There is more money (and more importantly art and fun) in not catering to an Evangelical audience. Plus there is often more truth.Report
A market segment of 40,000,000 is a pretty huge market-segment. And I don’t think it’s just Evangelicals that will be watching this thing. I mostly point to this to be filed away next time we talk about how much of popular entertainment is directed at liberal sensibilities rather than conservative sensibilities and someone tries to argue that there isn’t any market for the latter because if there was then obviously the capitalist networks would be all over it. The History Channel is going to make a ton of money off this, just like ABC made lots of money off of Touched By An Angel.
Artistically? Meh. I’ll watch this because it sounds interesting. You couldn’t pay me enough to watch another episode of Touched By An Angel (my ex-girlfriend’s family was into it, I avoided it but saw enough to last a lifetime). What you want to see, and what I want to see, only factors in to a certain degree. We are both pretty well served by popular entertainment (I may bitch about all of the shows that take place in a select few cities, but I recognize that as trivial in the grand scheme of things). Other folks? Not so much.Report
Will, did you watch Friday Night Lights? To me, it’s very much a show with a red state, rural, conservative sensibility, and it was a ratings disaster. (As I discuss here.)Report
From what I recall, it had five seasons.
Would that Firefly had such crappy ratings.Report
“Lone Star” took place in Texas, and portrayed Midland (where it split its time with Houston) pretty nicely, and lasted two episodes with some of the worst ratings in TV history. If you ignore the bigamy part, and the fact that the protagonist was on a mission to get the oil company away from oil… okay, perhaps also not the best example. But Midland was portrayed better than I remember Dillon being portrayed in FNL.Report
JB, FNL only survived as long as it did because it had some exec backers that really loved/believed in it, and it was able to strike an unusual shortened-season/shared-network/cost-sharing deal with Dish.
I hope we see more of these cost-sharing deals in the future, I’m glad they were able to tell as much of that story as they did. Maybe the next Firefly will be luckier.Report
The showrunner is pretty insistent that it is in no way conservative. There was a discussion here.
I’ve seen the first few episodes. I plan to go back and watch more of it. I congratulate them for not putting the show smack-dab in NYC, though the depiction of what I saw was not very flattering, as far as I recall. Which isn’t definitive in itself (my own backhome gets so little attention, even negative attention is better than none!). And is based on a relatively limited sample set.Report
I should add that though this was in response to what you said, it wasn’t exactly a response to you. Or to your artistic (or moral, if you prefer, critique). You simply said something that was a segue into what I was going to say.Report
“Huge Market yes but I still think is it huge enough to make up putting off and offending everyone else?”
This is a channel that regularly shows how aliens and the illuminati are responsible for, well, just about everything.Report
At least it’s no longer nazis.Report
At least the Nazi stuff was somewhat educational and true. Interstellar Yetis of the Luftwaffe, not so much.Report
I’m a 40 year old man who knows that there is a person out there who goes by “Snooki”.
I can totally understand complaining about the stupid and inane television shows out there. 100%.
I understand that there is a television show out there devoted to the wives of sports figures and how catty they are to each other. There are people out there who watch television shows about the wives of sports figures who are being catty to each other.
This is incomprehensible to me.
Finding out that there is a miniseries dedicated to The Bible but it doesn’t really follow the text and takes out all of the hooters and cleans up the violence strikes me as a 0.4 Snooki, honestly.
But this is, I imagine, a matter of taste.Report
If there is not an Interstellar Yetis of the Luftwaffe book or movie already, somebody needs to get on that, stat. I would read/watch the heck out of that.Report
Glyph: If there is not an Interstellar Yetis of the Luftwaffe book or movie already, somebody needs to get on that, stat. I would read/watch the heck out of that.
pat: …. that would be Star Wars ?? !!!Report
As a historian, it kills me that they still call it the History Channel. History, my ass. It’s the Myths and Aliens Channel. The name should be changed accordingly.Report
Let’s start with TLC first, shall we?
Related:
A few years back, The American Museum of Natural History had a special exhibit on mythical creatures. In telling a friend about it, he responded, “Mythical creatures? Those are neither natural nor historical.”
In reality, the exhibit was pretty cool, and looked at how misunderstood fossil records and other legitimately natural and historical elements contributed to the creation of these myths.Report
After 9PM, it becomes The Lunatick Channel.Report
I don’t know that I’m entirely okay with that.
I met a young man once who did not know any of the words to the song “Hotel California” but did know all the words to, and frequently listened to, a Christian rock song that he knew was set to the music of that famous song and told the story of the very pregnant Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay the night in Bethlehem. That such a parody song exists is rather cool. That this man should prefer the Christianized version to the original, is a matter of personal preference. But that he should have never been exposed to the decidedly mainstream cultural touchstone parodied renders the parody hollow.
Perhaps it is obvious, but I should point out that this young man’s failure to have ever heard the original song by the Eagles was not out of ignorance that a mainstream (or to use his word, “secular”) rock band had originated the music. His failure to have ever heard the Eagles song was willful.
If 10% of the population saturates itself in its own shadow culture to the point that it absents itself from the mainstream culture the rest of the 10% share, that’s not entirely healthy. Culture should be shared. If it isn’t it ceases to be culture and is transformed to anthropology. And as a people, we lose the commonality of our identity.Report
I didn’t know Christian Rock had a version of Hotel California about the Birth of Jesus. I am not surprised though.
I can see your point but the issue with Christian-Evangelicals is that they just don’t consume mainstream culture but they think it should all bow to their will because they have the force of God on their side and what not really. This is stuff like the Family Research Council and all the stuff Tod writes about in his spinning away towards irrelevance series. It seems to me that Evangelicals need everything to fit comfortably in their worldview or it scares them. There are a lot of discussions about why Evangelical popculture is often so bad and unbearable for everyone else:
http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/bad-christian-art
http://www.salon.com/2011/04/13/soul_surfer/
I want them to have their own space so they don’t turn everything into Bad Art.Report
Checking http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/top10s.html leads me to suspect that the upcoming battle between Evangelical and Non-Evangelical is one where the living will envy the dead.Report
If my sister’s family is any guide to the matter, the Evangelicals will join the Amish and Mennonites and Orthodox Jews in their own community. Her kids were told not to interact with mine. They’re already beginning to shun, always the first sign of detachment.Report
“ut the issue with Christian-Evangelicals is that they just don’t consume mainstream culture but they think it should all bow to their will because they have the force of God on their side and what not really.”
Well, some of them.Report
Burt, I agree with you that there should be something resembling a public culture so that we can have a commonality of identity and that its bad when too many people and groups isolate themselves from the public culture. My issue is that whether its really popular to have a true mass culture anymore because of the diversity of our society and becasue of technology. Even without getting into the intricacies of race and religion, most Western societies are incredibly diverse in their tates. You have the various nerd fandoms like anime, comic book, and video games fans, and more. You have the fans of Mad Men and other premium TV television shows. You have opera fans and pop fans, etc. Modern technology allows each access to their own cultural preferences more than in previous times. During the Golden Age of American mass culture (roughly from the 1890s to the Vietnam War), people with different tastes where forced into niches with limited access to thier forms of entertainment. This isn’t the case anymore.
How do you determine what should be common knowledge and what should be part of the mass culture canon? What should people be expected to know. I’m a dork and really don’t like a lot of pop culture but I still try to know whats kind of popular. I’ve been shocked at people who are much more mainstream than I am being unaware of things like who Pink Floyd are. I wouldn’t expect people to know eveything about Pink Floyd but the Wall made enough of a cultural impact that I’d expect them to know it, especially since they knew who the Talking Heads were.Report
Good point. Just look how diverse music is these days. Radiohead (who took their name from a Talking Heads song) is one of the more influential rock bands of the last two decades and they’re far from a household name.
One of my friends just asked “what is a radiohead” the other day. I wasn’t shocked. He listens to different music.
What made Beatlemania such a phenomenon was the fact that music diversity was non-existent on the radio.Report
I don’t pretend to have all the answers and there’s no solution to people engaging in some degree of lensing and filtration based on personal preferences and social affinities.
I do think that the experiences and attitudes of the young man who I described above is the culmination of Christian cultural cocooning, although I fully recognize that Christians do not have a monopoly on that sort of behavior. At some point, people start adopting different realities when they insulate themselves from other peoples’ perspectives and experiences. You wind up with, for instance, 24-hour cable news channels that deliberately lens their content to continually affirm their audiences’ political preferences to a degree so substantial it overpowers whatever substantive information content with which the propaganda might originally have been alloyed.Report
Was he familiar with the great religious music of the past, say that written by Handel, Bach, and Mozart? If so, I’m not going to lose much sleep over his not knowing much about the Eagles.Report
Why you hate teh Amish so much?Report
For example, I really don’t care if there is money in catering to people who are skeptical about Loving v. Virginia. What I care about is that they are wrong in their skepticism.Report
If only we could censor them. Hey, it’s not like corporations are people, right?
(If we’re taking turns making leaps, it’s your turn again.)Report
Where did I ever say I would censor them?
I just said that in my judgment (if I had power over such things), I would not cater to them.
I know many people here came from Evangelical backgrounds and even if they are currently not believers have some warm fondness for the culture of their youth. This is human and understandable. But to a non-Evangelical especially many Jews, the paternalism of Christian Evangelicals is simply unbearable. They know nothing of Judaism and yet constantly talk about Judeo-Christian ethics. I simply wish they would stop doing so.Report
You didn’t. You just make a leap and compared it to nostalgia for Loving v. Virginia.
I figured that one egregious comparison deserved another.Report
The “mixed marriage” comment — which sparked this portion of the debate — was definitely a reference to “Loving vs Virginia”. I don’t see any great leap there.Report
I can’t say I’ve personally encountered Evangelical Christians my age (I’m 34) that are against interracial marriage. In fact, several of my friends are in interracial marriages. That’s not to say there are some crazies out there.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents were going to a church in rural South Georgia. I’m not sure how long we attended because life is a blur at that age. Anyway, it was during the 1984 Olympics and my Dad was at the pastors home. The track and field races were on and the guy was pulling for the Russians against the Americans because he was a racist. My Dad was shocked and that was the end of that. We were always church hoppers, but that’s the only example I can remember of that kind of backward thinking among people considered “evangelical.”Report
You may be misremembering, Henshaw. The USSR and many of its allies boycotted the 1984 Olympics.Report
Good point… it could have been the track and field trials or he was pulling for whatever country had “non-black” runners.
I’d have to ask my Dad for exact details.Report
No problem. It happens to the best of us. And it happens to me, too.Report
In your history, Burt. Here in Heartland, USA, we remember how the Russkies came to the Dallas Olympics and were soundly whupped 🙂Report
Perhaps I am too secular and an academic grump but I have heard nothing but complaints to the show but:
1. This is again part of the History’s channel decent into being anything but History. There is a way to present Biblical history via archeological work to find what is truthful/existent in the bible and what is not but this series is not it. It seems to be history at best from a very machismo, brodude-friendly version. A kind of ancient “America, Fuck Yeah”. This is super-Macho Brodude Jesus as only Americans can imagine him.
2. The series seems to exclusively present the Bible from the prospective of a bland, conservative, Evangelical and does nothing to challenge their assertions and views of the Bible. The article below seems to show that Mainline Protestants and perhaps Catholics are weary of this version of the Bible,
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0318/Why-History-Channel-s-The-Bible-draws-boffo-ratings-despite-reviews-video
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-history-the-bible-review-20130302,0,3996253.storyReport
It’s not history. It just isn’t. Not history at all.Report
I’ve given up on History Channel ever doing a historical/mythical re-enactment correctly. But the Bible, well, here’s a collection of books which are tailor made for theatrical retelling.
But then, I’ve given up on anyone with a camera and an editing desk ever doing a story “by the book”. JRR Tolkien can’t even get a faithful retelling of his stories, no matter how much better his story is than the twee bullshit we get from Peter Jackson.
May I tell you a little dark secret, a fantasy from my twisted little soul? I hope you won’t think worse of me for it. I’d love to do an accurate retelling of the book of Bereshit/Genesis as a small-screen series — told straight, as Jewish mythology. A strange, brutal story, unwinding from the scroll, each parsha a perfect chunk for each episode, established by the original tellers of the tale.
Why screw with a good thing? A whole tradition of scholarship has grown up around the preservation and accurate retelling of these stories. You don’t have to believe them as articles of faith. Just don’t screw with them, like the goddamned History Channel did.Report
If you have not read The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
, oh… dude. Seriously. You *NEED* to.
It will blow you away.
It’s R. Crumb illustrating Genesis. It’s breathtaking. It’s like reading it for the first time.Report
I have it.Report
BlaiseP,
“I’ve given up on History Channel ever doing a historical/mythical re-enactment correctly. ”
Well, you’ll love this then (if you haven’t seen it already): http://www.theonion.com/articles/science-channel-refuses-to-dumb-down-science-any-f,2897/Report
Oh yeah…Report
The ninja angels…
Did they use the Frank Miller version of the Bible?Report
Ninja angels and Obama playing the devil. I am gonna tune in.Report
I feel this thread is incomplete without a link to Tim Minchin’s song, The Good Book.Report
or a link to the brick testament.Report
Then why are they trying to do it in a single season? Isn’t the entire point of television that you can keep going until you run out of material (or people stop watching)?Report
IIANM, the most popular television series of all time was Ramayan, done in 78 episodes. Mahabharat quickly followed with even better ratings and share on television. Ramayan was completely redone in 2008 and again in 2012, Ramayan: Sabke Jeevan ka Aadhar.
But the original Ramayan series is so well loved, it’s considered the standard, still available in 16 DVDs.
We’re kinda stupid, allowing these pinhead directors to spoil the ancient stories. I sense it started with Disney’s screwing with the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Now there’s a set of stories which could use a retelling.Report
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my english is not good.Report