It's the television equivalent of a religious pamphlet thrust on you by a benevolent creep, but with lower production values
Over the next few weeks, The Bible (Saturday, 9pm, C5), which dramatises stories from the, er, Bible, and drew 13 million viewers when it premiered in the US, ascends to our screens. Sounds promising, doesn't it? Are you imagining a luxurious HBO televisual lapdance? Abraham as a complex Tony Soprano figure? A gnawingly stunning Mary Magdalene gazing up at you with inky eyes as she metaphorically washes your feet with her hair?
Well, if you are you're as stupid as me. You'd also be forgetting that America contains many millions of hardcore religious fanatics who've banned themselves from enjoying anything good. Harry Potter is too satanic. Game Of Thrones has too many sinful, god-cursed dwarves. They probably can't even sit down to a bit of Blue Planet for all the problematic science within.
Strike me down if I'm wrong, but The Bible is not legitimate TV. It's a CGI missionary drive; the television equivalent of a religious pamphlet thrust on you by a benevolent creep, but with lower production values. It feels exactly like being beaten around the head with a children's illustrated Bible. The plot departs from the good book in big ways, small ways, in fact any way the makers (evangelical husband and wife Mark Burnett and Roma Downey) fancy. They've made no secret of their massive kumbaya agenda, saying their aim in making the miniseries was to bring people "back to the Bible".
As historical sagas go, the book itself is a banger. The sex, death and talking donkeys make up for the plot holes, and all are interwoven with the kind of backstabbing and deceit that TV writers would piss on their grandma for. The scope for juicy, scandalous action is huge. Half the people in the Bible, were they transported to modern times, would be considered terrorists, while the other half would have to sign the sex offenders register. How can that not translate to blinding television?
Shimmering smug Christ knows, but they've managed it. The first episode covers a few chunks of Genesis and Exodus. The focus here is on Abraham, played by Gary Oliver, a Happy Shopper Brian Blessed who leaves you with the impression that if he did have a hotline to God, it was only so God could tell him to stop being such a boorish clod. The second half is given to Moses, whose performance borrows heavily from Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, and even more heavily from Charlton Heston at The Ten Commandments' wrap party, when he was so monumentally wankered he had to sleep it off under a hedge for a few days.
But, by the look of it, tone or characterisation aren't important when you're proselytising. A big shiny crucifix sticker slapped over the fissures where, oh, I dunno, empathy should be apparently suffices if you love Jesus enough. They're even less important when you've invented celestial Power Rangers which descend from the heavens and smite Sodom right up (this happens, pretty much). I picture the writers sat in front of a sheet of paper headed BIBLE ADAPTATION, blank but for rudimentary fight scenes doodled in the margins waiting for their desktop Jesus figurine to radiate beams of divine dramatic structure on to the page.
The closest thing to emotional engagement you experience is feeling sorry for the actors, who failed to realise what they were signing up for. Everyone wanders drily around some dry landscapes while the dry desert wind blows through the gaps in dialogue, hoping they're conveying "ancient" and "holy". They could have leavened things with a few choice phrases, but the best ones – "Holy Christ", "Christ on a stick", "suppurating bloody Christ", that sort of thing – hadn't been invented yet.
You could describe The Bible as a disquieting recruitment drive, but I wouldn't give it the credit. Only people off their tits on God could stomach all 10 hours of this. In summary, don't watch it. And anyway, the book's better than the miniseries.
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