Television watchers across the country are glomming on to an unlikely megahit: the History Channel’s 10-hour retelling of stories from the Bible. To the disbelief of Hollywood executives, viewers are shunning a lineup that includes “Revenge” and “The Mentalist” to watch another telling of the greatest story ever told.
During its first three weeks, the miniseries produced by reality-show producer Mark Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, the star of “Touched By an Angel,” has drawn upward of 10 million viewers for each episode. That’s more, our critic Daniel Wattenberg reports, than anything aired by ABC or NBC during the same period. Who needs “Scandal” or “Deception” when the original, complete with serpent, is available?
This is not a line-by-line, chapter-and-verse telling of the stories from the Bible. Events are compressed, and more than one critical eyebrow has been raised over the ninja-style fighting engaged in by angels and the Israelites in their escape from bondage.
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Hollywood itself would do well to closely examine the overall success of “The Bible,” which concludes its initial television run on Sunday. Home-video release will follow by Tuesday, and the DVD and Blu-ray discs are expected to be hot sellers, too.
Sordid and trashy has become the norm for much of television entertainment, and the Bible’s blockbuster success should inspire entertainment executives to think again about taking stories from the Bible. A lot of people thought the runaway success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” a decade ago would inspire Hollywood, too. The market for family-oriented, values-affirming entertainment is huge and all but untapped. The success of “The Bible” ought to persuade Hollywood, where the pursuit of money is all, that such stories are where the money is.
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