A.D.: The Bible Will Not be Continued

The Bible, a 10-part mini-series was a big ratings success on The History Channel a couple of years ago. Produced by Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice, Shark Tank) and his wife, Roma Downey (Touched by an Angel), it led to a major motion picture, Son of Man, and now a 12-part series on NBC called A.D.: The Bible Continues. The series premiered on Easter Sunday to a respectable audience of 10 million viewers, but the audience declined each week and, by the season finale two weeks ago on Father's Day, the audience had dropped to less than half that of the premiere.

Mark Burnett -- who nowadays looks like an OT character with his Duck Dynasty beard -- had hoped that the new series would be like Game of Thrones and air for several seasons, premiering on Easter Sunday each year. But that was not to be. A couple of days ago, NBC announced that the program would not be renewed for a second season. Undaunted, Burnett and Downey say that they will continue the program on their new faith channel. But, if so, it will be with a different cast because the main actors were released from their contracts following NBC's cancellation of the series.

Roma Downey, Mark Burnett (and his beard)

I did not watch The History Channel's The Bible  mini-series, so I can't really compare A.D. to that. The Bible certainly sounds like something I would have been interested in, but the promos made it look like it would be all cheesy sets, fake beards and bad acting. The History Channel simply does not have the budget that one of the main networks does. There were lots of Bible movies that hit the high points like Noah and the Flood, Abraham, the Exodus, and so on. I've been down that road before and had no desire to waste my time on it unless it offered something new, or a different take on the material.

I decided to watch A.D.: The Bible Continues because the post-gospel material covered in Acts of the Apostles doesn't often get movie treatment. The only thing similar that I can recall was a 5-part mini-series, also called A.D., that aired 30 years ago. It was supposed to be the continuation of Franco Zeffirelli's 2-part Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but paled in comparison. While Jesus of Nazareth balanced reverence with believability, good production values and acting, the 1985 version of A.D. was rather amateurish by comparison. 1981's made-for-TV movie Peter and Paul was a similar misfire.

Actually, I thought A.D.: The Bible Continues would be a mini-series like The Bible was. I was expecting, therefore, that my time investment would be limited but, after two or three episodes, I realized that the pacing of the plot was going too slow to allow it to cover the entire Acts of the Apostles within the scope of a half-dozen or so episodes. And, apparently not finding the storylines in Acts compelling enough, the producers saw fit to introduce extraneous elements to provide dramatic conflict, such as the troubles Caiaphas and Pilate have with their wives or a Zealot attempt on Pilate's life that led to mass crucifixions.


Peter (Adam Levy) and Mary Magdalene (Chipo Chung). No Paul.

My wife's interest was a fairly good barometer of the show's flagging ratings. She watched the first few episodes with me and, I think, found them interesting. She's not as familiar with the contents of Acts as I am and seemed to be a member of the audience this program was trying to target. She would ask me if something that just happened was in the Bible. For the first couple of episodes, I was able to tell her it was. Then it was, "That wasn't in the Bible, but it could have been." At some point, she said, "You can watch it without me. If it is just making up stuff, I don't see any point in watching."

And there you have the problem with A.D.: The Bible Continues. The producers of the show don't understand who their intended audience is. True-blue Bible believers want a program that will portray the Bible as it was written. A.D.: The Bible Continues attempts to do that...sort of. If Acts says that an angel rolled the stone away from Jesus' tomb, then they will show an angel drop down from heaven like a meteor and roll away the stone. But then the producers start elaborating on what the Bible says by putting the Ethiopian eunuch (from Acts 8:27-39) in cahoots with the Zealots and, as a result, they lose the Christians who want to see fidelity to the Bible story. When creationist Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis finds your program unbelievable, you've really accomplished something.

I don't have a problem with a faith-based program deviating from the scriptures, just like I don't expect a movie to be exactly like the book. What plays on the written page doesn't necessarily translate to the screen, and vice versa. The program could have gone in a different direction by having a more character-driven narrative and downplaying the miracles. For example, it would have been interesting to show the interior journey that Saul took from being a persecutor of the early Church to its greatest evangelist. You could portray Saul being struck by lightning and, when he comes to, he relates his experience of encountering the resurrected Jesus. You don't have to literally show a glorified Jesus talking to him to get the point across. Such a program might not attract fundamentalists, but it might have appeal to people like my wife who aren't familiar with the post-gospel stories of the apostles.

What the producers chose to do instead was play it both ways. Re-enact the miracles as described in the Bible with cheesy special effects to get the Bible crowd while amping up the dramatic tension with over-the-top acting and a jaw-dropping nonchalance towards historical accuracy to appeal to those who are just looking for entertainment. The jump-the-shark moment for me was when the Emperor Tiberius decided to make a house call on Pilate in Jerusalem with his nephew Caligula in his entourage. Historically, Tiberius spent the last years of his life on his island of Capri. Even if he hadn't, the idea of an emperor of Rome personally making a journey all the way to Jerusalem to do a performance review on one of his governors is just ludicrous.

It continued to get worse once Caligula killed Tiberius and, upon becoming emperor, ordered his statue placed in the Jewish Temple. Caligula may have toyed with the idea according to Roman historians, but it never happened. So the final episode (appropriately titled "The Abomination") builds to a climactic confrontation between the Romans trying to place the statue in the Court of the Women and the Jewish Sanhedrin and Jesus' disciples, in a first-century act of civil disobedience, saying literally, "Over our dead bodies." If this were a fictional program like Game of Thrones, the episode might work as drama, but when you know the entire crisis never happened as part of history, it rings hollow.

On the positive side, I did appreciate the multi-ethnic cast. There were many black and brown faces to go along with the usual Caucasian actors you typically find in Bible movies. Probably due to Roma Downey's influence, female characters like Mary Magdalene, Pilate's wife Claudia, and Caiaphas' wife Leah had important roles throughout and weren't just background characters. The computer-generated views of the Temple really give you an idea of the grandeur of the structure and the sets and costumes looked well-done. There were a lot of fake beards and it was jarring to see actors like Richard Coyle (Jeff from BBC's Coupling) as Caiaphas and James Callis (Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica) as Herod Antipas, but overall, the "look" was right.

In conclusion, I'm not at all surprised that the series will not be renewed. Apparently, faith-based programming is popular in small doses, but there's not enough of an audience to pull in the kind of ratings that a major network like NBC expects. And if you depart too much from the Holy Scriptures to fill in narrative gaps or provide motivation for your characters, you lose a big chunk of the Bible-believing audience. Burnett and Downey get an "A" for effort but a "D" for execution.