Top TV Producers Have Faith Audiences Will Tune Into These Biblical Tales

“Why not do the most difficult thing on the planet to get made at FOX television?” said executive producer Julie Weitz in a recent interview with The Epoch Times—which also included executive producer Carol Mendelsohn—about the upcoming TV mini-series event “The Faithful: Women of the Bible.”

“They’re morality tales,” Weitz said. “They’re close to us. They are their own little storybooks that we’ve been holding on to for our whole lives. So why shouldn’t we make them into films?”

The three-part, six-hour series takes on the story of the Bible’s most legendary women and will unfold over three consecutive weeks—March 22, March 29, and April 5—during the Easter and Passover season. The episodes will be available on Hulu the following day.

For Mendelsohn, who is best known for helming the popular crime drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and its multiple spin-offs, the stars were aligned.

“It spoke to me in a very big way,” she said. “Julie and I have been producing partners for many, many years. She did many of the Bible movies at Turner [Network Television]. I have some friends, and they’re among the faithful, and we talk about a lot of things, and they were talking about women in the Bible. … It feels like many of the same problems, the same issues [are what] we have today.”

“When these stories are told honestly and beautifully and are about the people, it doesn’t matter that it happened 2,000 years ago or in the 1500s or in some fantasy galaxy far, far away; it’s relatable,” said Weitz.

The episodes will be told through the lens of five of the Bible’s most legendary women: Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Hagar, Sarah’s servant and the mother of Ishmael; Rebekah, Sarah’s daughter-in-law and the wife of Isaac; Leah, Jacob’s wife and the mother of six of the twelve tribes of Israel; and Rachel, Jacob’s favored wife.

“The men are still very prominent in the show, but it’s about the role the women played and their destiny,” said Mendelsohn.

“We discovered that our old friend, René Echevarria, was a biblical scholar, not just a man that’s observant, but actually a biblical scholar,” said Weitz about the versatile Hollywood show runner and show creator who joined them as an executive producer on “The Faithful.”

“The guy knows everything. We had a fairly consistent rule, which was if it’s in the Bible, we tell it like it is. If it’s not, we are free to invent. We also had religious experts from all over the spectrum. So we were kept honest. And [René] loved the approach.”

Getting talent together to make the production “was amazing as if it was destined,” said Mendelsohn.

“The actors so wanted to be a part of it—so wanted to play these characters,” she said.

The stars of the series include Minnie Driver (Sarah), Jeffrey Donovan (Abraham), Natacha Karam (Hagar), Alexa Davalos (Rebekah), Millie Brady (Leah), and Blu Hunt (Rachel).

“The characters are iconic and everlasting, and the three of us [producers] talked very long and hard about each of their journeys—surrogacy, succession, sister rivalry, love, marriage, families, survival—and to try to make them not only relevant, but also to give them individual journeys that would be understandable to the audience and to the actors,” said Weitz.

With filming taking place in and around Rome to give the series its grounding, the process took two years from start to finish.

“We arrived in Rome just before the Jubilee. Carol’s from Chicago, and our first weekend there, she and I, we were living in Vatican City, right around the corner from the Vatican. We sauntered up, and the Pope walks out and starts to give his Sunday spiel,” recalled Weitz. “And the bells toll, and the people gasp, and we’re going: ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ It’s as if Brad Pitt had just walked out on a balcony. So being there at that time, and shooting a show about the Genesis, just felt like, ‘Wow, this was meant to be; there’s something very special in what we are experiencing right now.’”

Then there was the menagerie required to tell these tales.

“I’d never worked with camels before,” said Mendelsohn. “We had camels; one was white. We had horses. We had rams and sheep and dogs. It became so real. Sometimes you’d forget, when we’re doing a scene, where you are. I was like back in time.”

The producers are optimistic that “The Faithful” will be just the beginning.

“We have an all-star list for future episodes,” said Weitz. “We’ve done extensive research on these women. We actually did it before we even pitched to get a sense of what it would look like moving forward and the [concept] of the show being the genealogy of a family tree. It also informed everything that we did, because everybody comes from Abraham and Sarah and Jacob’s tribes. And this is where René is just mind-boggling. He has traced some of these characters from their genesis in the Bible all the way up to the New Testament. It made us so excited. Here is a line, a little crooked, but a line that goes all the way through history.”

Mendelsohn hopes the event will bring back a little of that TV-watching vibe she recalls fondly from her childhood.

“I remember the days when families sat down together,” said Mendelsohn, recalling the highly rated Emmy-award-winning specials “Roots” and “The Winds of War” from the 1970s and 1980s.

“I hope that [‘The Faithful’] is something everybody sits down for two hours and watches—‘the greatest story ever told,’ but not told, because it’s about the women.”