The Good Tube: The History Channel Does the Bible

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62 Responses

  1. Tod Kelly says:

    ” Joseph calls her a whore before he finally figures out the child is divine thanks to Maury Povich an angel ”

    That alone was worth the read.Report

    • Jeff No-Last-Name in reply to Tod Kelly says:

      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

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Jeff No-Last-Name says:

        OK. But if things start to get ugly, remember that no babies were harmed in the filming of that episode.Report

      • Barry in reply to Jeff No-Last-Name says:

        “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

    • Mike Schilling in reply to Tod Kelly says:

      “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

  2. Jeff No-Last-Name says:

    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

    • NewDealer in reply to Jeff No-Last-Name says:

      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

      • Will Truman in reply to NewDealer says:

        Which, it turns out, there is a huge market for if more networks cared to notice…Report

        • NewDealer in reply to Will Truman says:

          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

          • Will Truman in reply to NewDealer says:

            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

            • Mike Schilling in reply to Will Truman says:

              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

              • Jaybird in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                From what I recall, it had five seasons.

                Would that Firefly had such crappy ratings.Report

              • Will Truman in reply to Jaybird says:

                “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

              • Glyph in reply to Jaybird says:

                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

          • Will Truman in reply to NewDealer says:

            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

          • Kolohe in reply to NewDealer says:

            “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

            • Nob Akimoto in reply to Kolohe says:

              At least it’s no longer nazis.Report

              • Mo in reply to Nob Akimoto says:

                At least the Nazi stuff was somewhat educational and true. Interstellar Yetis of the Luftwaffe, not so much.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Mo says:

                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

              • Glyph in reply to Mo says:

                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

              • Pat in reply to Glyph says:

                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

            • Michelle in reply to Kolohe says:

              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

              • Kazzy in reply to Michelle says:

                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

              • BlaiseP in reply to Kazzy says:

                After 9PM, it becomes The Lunatick Channel.Report

          • Burt Likko in reply to NewDealer says:

            I am largely okay with right-wing Evangelicals having their own Shadow Culture if they leave the rest of us alone.

            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

            • NewDealer in reply to Burt Likko says:

              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

            • LeeEsq in reply to Burt Likko says:

              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

              • Henshaw in reply to LeeEsq says:

                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

              • Burt Likko in reply to LeeEsq says:

                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

              • Mike Schilling in reply to Burt Likko says:

                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

            • Kim in reply to Burt Likko says:

              Why you hate teh Amish so much?Report

        • NewDealer in reply to Will Truman says:

          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

          • Jaybird in reply to NewDealer says:

            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

            • NewDealer in reply to Jaybird says:

              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

      • Henshaw in reply to NewDealer says:

        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

  3. NewDealer says:

    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

  4. BlaiseP says:

    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

  5. Nob Akimoto says:

    The ninja angels…

    Did they use the Frank Miller version of the Bible?Report

  6. James K says:

    I feel this thread is incomplete without a link to Tim Minchin’s song, The Good Book.Report

  7. Fnord says:

    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….Ten hours doesn’t allow enough time to compress something as long and complicated as the Bible.

    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

    • BlaiseP in reply to Fnord says:

      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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