Fox Is Airing a Girlboss Version of the Old Testament
We’re in a Bible-curious time for popular media. In the past year, star-studded animated movies about Jesus and the patriarch David each made more than $80 million in theatrical runs, proving biblical films can be powerful contenders at the box office. On streaming services, there have recently been a number of Scripture-based shows, including the Exodus comedy The Promised Land; Amazon’s sword-and-sandals fantasy series House of David; a coming Joseph of Egypt drama; and, most importantly, the mega-hit New Testament drama The Chosen, which proved to studios that there was a rabid market for faith-based content in the first place
t seems that everyone is suddenly waking up to the potential for this particularly well-known material. And in the scramble to put its own contribution forward, Fox, with its new series on the biblical matriarchs, is testing out whether, beyond big-budget movie epics and narrowly targeted streaming shows, biblical stories might draw these viewers to traditional television.
The Faithful, a three-week “event series” tied to Easter and debuting Sunday in a prime-time slot (and streaming the next day on Hulu), hopes to excite audiences with the promise of religious storytelling with a fresh angle and a big name: Its first two episodes, about Abraham’s wife and her handmaid, star Minnie Driver as Sarah. (Driver is not herself religious, at least publicly, but said during a promotional event that she has long “been drawn to playing women who take big leaps of faith, whether romantically, spiritually or morally.”) The idea, to focus on retelling the stories through “the rarely heard perspective of the women of the Bible,” has a whiff of feminism to it that seems to tease something new. But what it actually delivers is something else—a crushingly dull offering that might be a genuine liability for the movement it’s trying to tap into. The series, from writers whose credits include Castle, Teen Wolf, and many iterations of CSI, isn’t just tired and formulaic. It’s also so contorted in its own gender politics that it lays bare just how limited its model—the one so many see as the path forward for religious media—really is.
The story of Sarah, wife of Abraham—or Sarai and Abram, as they’re known for most of the show—is admittedly a challenging one. The biblical story is oriented around concerns with genealogy and bloodlines: She cannot have children, so to produce an heir, she instructs her slave, Hagar, to have sex with her husband. When the pregnant Hagar becomes contemptuous, Sarah mistreats her, causing her to flee. Miraculously, in her old age, Sarah then has her own child, Isaac. When tensions between these offspring arise, she casts Hagar and her son, Ishmael, out into the wilderness, where they nearly die. To make Sarah more palatable, The Faithful makes Hagar more of a consenting party in the arrangement, with gratitude and love for Sarah, and gives Sarah a secret noble motivation for casting out Hagar and Ishmael.
But the real problem with Driver’s Sarah is that she is, bafflingly, not just an Old Testament matriarch but an occasional girlboss. (The show has a clear Christian bias; its promotional material speaks of the Old Testament rather than the Hebrew Bible.) Setting aside Driver’s distractingly age-suspended face, Sarah seems misplaced in time by her dialogue, fit for a feisty Regency heroine: “Marrying a man I hardly know? Much less admire? I think not.” She tries to stab Pharaoh (a creative liberty) and puts her whole crew in danger when she refuses to prostrate herself before him. She hopes her son will marry a woman who is “fearless and full of adventure.” At one point Abraham pronounces that she was “always the stronger one.” And for reasons that are never explained to the viewer, she tells us, “I decided long ago I would bow to no man.”
The issue with girl-power Sarah is that the show pretends to be something it isn’t, with Driver’s pluckiness as a kind of mask for its actual tradwife spirit. Cool, a viewer might think, a woman is the main character! She’s strong-willed and courageous, and she stands up to powerful men!—without noticing that her only motivation, the whole time, is to have children and to please her husband, whom she describes to Hagar as “her world.” She tells Abraham, in introducing the subject of her barrenness, “I failed you.” She even pleads with God to make her fertile not for her own sake, but “for him, for Abraham, your faithful servant. Please let him have this child.” Those motivations make sense for the biblical Sarah, composed as a character in the ancient world, but they don’t track for the headstrong female protagonist the writers want us to see.
THE FAITHFUL: What You Need to Know About the Series Premiere
Fox’s description of the premiere: “Sarah feels incomplete without the child that has been promised to her and her husband, Abraham, by God. After braving isolation, famine, the ire of Pharaoh, and several more years of barrenness, she resorts to her own plan to bring a child into the world involving her maidservant Hagar and Abraham. However, Sarah’s jealousy and mistrust set in, forcing Hagar to make a difficult decision about her and her child’s future, as they are all stunned by a miracle from God.”https://dutchrelay.com/regef7219c?key=d26f046d77045c805cf7655456802f03
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