It may be getting completely lost among the larger pop culture conversation surrounding the most popular shows on TV, but Amazon Prime Video’s House of David is quietly putting up solid numbers for the streaming service, behind only its two monster shows, Reacher and Invincible, both in the middle of airing new seasons.
House of David is an adaptation of well, the Bible. It’s a rare, Christianity-based series on a high profile streaming service, and it’s further proof there’s a market for such a thing. We’ve only seen shows like this with any amount of traction a few times before. The highest-profile one would be The Chosen, also on Amazon, which has clearly realized there’s a larger market for this type of production. The Chosen has run for four seasons now, and if there is something emblematic of this trend, it would be the fact that this does not have enough critic reviews for a Rotten Tomatoes score, but it has a 97% audience score, and an incredible 9.2/10 on IMDB. There’s quite the disconnect there.
House of David does have…five critic reviews in, giving it a 60%, but the show has an 89% audience score. Not quite as well-received as The Chosen. House of David may return for season 2, but it’s not clear yet if that’s going to happen.
House of David cast the totally unknown Michael Iskander as David, where this is his first credited role. It also stars hulking bodybuilder Martyn Ford as all-important David foe, Goliath, where that confrontation will be the season finale. At 6’8, tattooed and exploding with muscle, Ford is something to behold. The only “name” I recognize from this cast list is Avatar’s Stephen Lang as Samuel. Aylet Zurer is Queen Ahinoam. You might not know her, but she was Superman’s mother in Man of Steel, way back when.
There is a big market for Christian, Bible-based series. It’s just that we don’t often see them produced in Hollywood. Amazon seems to be starting to understand the market for this, plus they are widely watched paired with what has to be a relatively small budget compared to other series. Though, perhaps we should have seen this lesson learned back in 2004 when The Passion of the Christ made $611 million worldwide. Even Darren Aronofsky’s trippy, mostly Biblically-inaccurate Noah made $359 million in 2014.
I would expect to see Amazon, or even other streaming services, start to find more content in the Bible given its vast amount of stories, potentially low cost and obvious level of audience interest. For now, it seems to mainly be Amazon who get it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
