Just as The Chosen wrapped up the release of Season 5 in the United States, the hit series about Jesus and those who knew him is set to stream internationally this month. Source: CNS.
The Vatican hosted a news conference and a premiere of one of the new season’s episodes in its film theatre on June 23 before cast and crew members hit the red carpet at a Rome theatre for a special screening of the episode The Last Supper, with members of the public, including numerous seminarians, priests and nuns living in the Italian capital.
The goal of the series is “for people to get a deeper connection to Christ and to have a more intimate relationship with him,” Jonathan Roumie, who portrays Christ in the series, said at the red-carpet event.
The Chosen debuted at the end of 2017 as an online series, and has since become a TV series.
With more than 900 million episode views and a global audience exceeding 280 million, the series’ creator and director, Dallas Jenkins, said its “secret sauce” is portraying Jesus and those who knew him in a way that is less formal or stiff.
When meeting fans, he said, they typically say that what they love about the series is “it just feels so real. It feels so human.”
“Those human moments do not detract from the divinity (of Christ) and do not detract from the spirituality” of the events and teachings they depict, he said.
“In many ways, they make them even more beautiful that the God of the universe came to Earth, Emmanuel, God with us, and laughed with his friends at a wedding,” he said.
Jenkins said the “endgame” of the show is not popularity or profit, but “to remind people that these events were real” and that biblical figures are more than literary characters or subjects depicted in art.
“The show is to point you towards the real person of Jesus and to point people towards people like yourself. To get disciples and to worship and to pray,” he said.
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The Chosen’s ‘endgame’ is to point people to Jesus, series’ creator says (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
