The Holy Bible is, if you think about it, the perfect source material for prestige TV. Particularly in the Old Testament, there’s sex and violence in spades, all rooted in universally recognizable IP. And it’s all in the public domain, meaning there’s no need to deal with pesky fine print like legal rights.
In fact, there already is a massive, Bible-based show: “The Chosen,” the four-season (and counting) drama dramatizing the life of Jesus Christ himself. “The Chosen” began as a crowdfunded short in 2017, and even now, its runaway success is easy to escape notice outside its core faith-based audience due to a distribution strategy that eschewed traditional platforms in favor of an in-house website and app. No longer, though: earlier this month, Amazon MGM Studios announced a deal to exclusively stream the series, bringing the son of God to the shelves of the Everything Store.
The move, while dramatic, was more of a doubling down on a strategy Amazon was already pursuing. This week, streaming service Prime Video debuts “House of David,” a show that’s a prequel of sorts to “The Chosen” while being largely unaffiliated. (“The Chosen” is spearheaded by creator Dallas Jenkins and his company 5&2 Studios; “House of David” was developed by Christian filmmaker Jon Erwin and his studio The Wonder Project. Jenkins is a shareholder in The Wonder Project, though he has no credited role in “House of David.”) The eight-episode season is an origin story for the titular king, beginning with a flash forward to his showdown with Goliath (Martyn Ford) before rewinding to his days as a humble shepherd.
“House of David” cements Amazon as the major entertainment hub with the deepest well of Judeo-Christian content, a bit of branding that reads like an extension of Prime Video’s general embrace of conservative-coded projects like “Jack Ryan” and “The Terminal List.” The actual teachings of an ancient religious tradition are, of course, nonpartisan, but there’s an evident attempt on Amazon’s part to speak to customers otherwise overlooked by liberal, cosmopolitan Hollywood. “House of David” may advance that effort. As a story in its own right, though, it’s unlikely to have the staying power of its inspiration.
The plot of “House of David” contains echoes of “Game of Thrones.” As David (Michael Iskander) comes into his own, the reigning King Saul (Ali Suliman), who presides over a united Kingdom of Israel, descends into madness, throwing the court around him into instability. The prophet Samuel (Stephen Lang) has declared that Saul is no longer divinely ordained, opening a power vacuum just as the realm faces threats from without.
Amazon has invested heavily in epic genre fare through fantasy and sci-fi projects like “The Wheel of Time,” “Fallout” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” Even if one isn’t religious, it should be possible to connect with “House of David” on similar terms: as a major production filmed on location in the Mediterranean (largely in Greece), with scads of extras and a Campbellian hero’s journey. As a seer with a flowing white beard, Samuel is basically the Merlin to David’s Arthur, and Saul’s wife Ahinoam (Ayelet Zurer) weighs using “black magic” — a direct quote — to cure her husband’s ailment.
But the barrier to entry for “House of David” isn’t ideological. The show isn’t preachy; it just depicts characters deeply concerned with God’s intentions, as makes sense for their time and place. (The Kingdom as depicted is not based in much verified history and does not correspond precisely to the modern state of Israel, though the timeframe is about a millennium before the birth of Christ.) It is, however, wooden and cheap-looking, humorless and dull. “House of David” doesn’t force its creative team’s beliefs on viewers. It also doesn’t give those who don’t already share them any reason to buy in.
For a show about scheming and jockeying for favor at court, “House of David” never makes its protagonists seem especially complex or varied, apart from a head-spinning array of accents. (The cast is multinational, including Israeli, Palestinian, British and American performers who never settle on a consistent inflection.) The value proposition of a Bible show is to render mythic figures as flawed, flesh-and-blood people — to put their struggles on the same scale as ours. That doesn’t happen here. David himself is a generic naif whose sole distinguishing trait is a passion for music, curiously sung in unsubtitled Hebrew while the spoken dialogue is in English. The world around him is never fleshed out as a distinct society alien to the modern sensibility, the way “Shōgun” — TV’s recent gold standard for historical fiction — did for 17th century Japan. The only hints of such harsh moral codes are an emphasis on filial obedience by David’s father Jesse (Louis Ferrera) and talk of a virgin being “defiled” on pain of public stoning.
Instead, we get hokey special effects when David has visions of fire and pre-orthodontic Hebrews with distractingly straight, white teeth. The giants, led by Goliath, are neat to behold, but Saul’s hallucinations quickly grow tiresome, the least interesting way to show a secure monarch succumbing to paranoia. They’re about as compelling as David’s perfunctory romance with Saul’s daughter Mychal (Indy Lewis), which seems to take shape not out of any shared chemistry but because he’s a hero in need of a princess.
“House of David” seems to take its appeal for granted: the show is based on one of the most famous stories ever told, and therefore has no need to explain what’s going on or why we should care. In reality, the opposite is true. Precisely because many of us learned these tales in Sunday school, “House of David” needs to put its own spin on the saga. After all, you can find the original in any hotel drawer. It’s a pretty gripping read.
The first three episodes of “House of David” are now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Thursdays.