At one particular stop on my career jitney I spent a disproportionate amount of time and an atypically large chunk of other people’s money on the late and thoroughly forgettable mashup known as FOX Family. I’ve previously mused about how we got stuck with the name despite the lame efforts of many to find a viable, legal alternative. How we even got to that point was an even more memorable process.
A number of multivideo programming distributors were aghast at the prospect of Bart Simpson and Pat Robertson joining forces, especially the ones that proudly touted what they originally signed up for as The Christian Broadcasting Network. And if you give an operator a shred of wiggle room, they’ll drag in their internal counsels and even a few consultants to find a way to renegotiate their contractual commitment. There were more than a few worrywarts amongst us that feared that vision was something that couldn’t be unseen, so given my unique history I was assigned by the Family Channel (my then-current employer), FOX (my prior employer) and FOX Kids (my eventual employer) to develop a credible counterpoint. We called it the Hamhocks and Lox project, as the combination we referenced above was seen as being about as plausible and desirable.
We commissioned a bunch of focus groups in a host of cities large and small, urban and rural. We had quite a few videoconferences with the multiple stakeholders eagerly awaiting our results; in the pre-Zoom era this was neither inexpensive nor technically easy. The good news was once we presented a potential schedule of the channel to our respondents any pre-existing biases were quickly forgotten. To a person, they indicated they would judge FOX Family on its own merits. The bad news was they indeed did just that; if you ever saw the likes of SHOW ME THE FUNNY or I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SAID THAT! you’d know why. If you didn’t, you were in good company among more than 99 per cent of subscribers that never watched.
I suspect that study was long forgotten by those in charge of FOX these days. It’s understandable; it’s a much different company now, with FOX News (and FOX Sports) as its tentpole programming. So that might explain in theory why the network chose to turn over a time slot that for decades has been defined by ANIMATION DOMINATION to something like what SLATE’s Molly Olmstead described when it premiered last week:
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(.)
And as she continued, that at least on paper should have appealed to the kinds of mindsets that habitually watch FOX News, especially given the sorts of trends we’ve seen of late in this sort of fare:
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.
So on a weekend where highlights from CPAC, both celebratory and mocking, were dominating my news feeds I was willing to give this a shot. I even caught up with the earlier episodes, throwing Hulu one of the occasional bones that I choose to. Let’s just say it’s a good thing I hadn’t yet landed on what turned out to be Olmstead’s review:
(W)hat 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.
(T)he 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.
I’ve had my own negative experiences with one of the writers and more notably with Driver herself, so my own reaction to her over-the-top performance brought back nightmarish memories of how a similar approach overwhelmed and doomed an FX flop called THE RICHES, which limped through two broken seasons into deserved obscurity. The one positive that came from that was being able to share a few flasks with her co-star Eddie Izzard and his co-producer who would seek refuge in my office after being subjected to what they perceived as a shower of sh-t from my creative colleagues. Let’s just say Izzard was anything but a fan of hers. He frequently proposed that we test various ways that Driver’s character could meet an untimely demise.
I sort of net out closer to how the somewhat more understanding path to rejection that THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Angie Han chose to share:
(I)t’s difficult not to wish Fox’s The Faithful: Women of the Bible offered something more substantive to hang on to than the sense that everything we’re seeing is being guided by the hands of higher powers — God’s, but also history’s, and creator René Echevarria’s.
Ostensibly an effort to recenter the female perspective in some of the most famous tales from the Book of Genesis, the three-part event miniseries instead treats its characters like paper dolls to be pushed around at the whims of a narrative set in stone millennia ago. In the end, it offers little actual insight into these women, the men around them or even the deity who’s willed all of their fates into being.
As it turned out, history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to poor execution trumping (pun intended) otherwise credible intentions. Last Sunday’s premieres managed just 1.54 million viewers, losing even to a hastily scheduled encore of AMERICAN IDOL in the wake of THE BACHELORETTE’s eleventh hour cancellation that likely didn’t make many EPG updates. And that’s roughly half of what the usual FOX News Channel dreck delivered. So much for all of that cross-promotion.
There are certain sorts of mash-ups that somehow work. I’ve actually begun to like the “limited edition” flavors of Lays, Ruffles and Cheetos. John Oliver had a wonderful segment on new offerings at major league baseball stadia for this season that include the likes of a chow mein burrito and fried chicken and churros. Thankfully for them, hamhocks and lox haven’t yet been considered. My sage advice based upon my experiences then and now: Keep it that way.
Until next time…