What happens when the Bible’s most gripping tales land on prime time TV? No, it’s not an infomercial for stone tablets, but Fox’s bold new miniseries, The Faithful: Women of the Bible. Here, drama rivaling any cable TV soaper finds its roots in the Book of Genesis—and gets a twist as the stories orbit the formidable matriarchs who helped shape not just families, but entire faiths.
Epic Drama, Ancient Roots
- A desperate couple grapples with infertility.
- A mother shoulders the fate of twins fated for lifelong conflict.
- Two sisters, one man, and a love triangle for the ages.
Sound like network drama with a heavy pour of melodrama? These storylines actually stem straight from one of the world’s bestselling books: the Bible. Fox’s The Faithful: Women of the Bible, a three-part television event, shines a fresh spotlight on Genesis’ often-overlooked heroines—Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel—delivering their tales with both reverence and irreverence (well, as much as you can when the Almighty features in the character list).
René Echevarria, the brains behind the first installment and the showrunner, notes, “These are three generations of women who passed the baton of what was set in motion by Sarah and Abraham, and the episodes are portraits of different types of marriages.” If marriages were easy, drama writers (and divorce lawyers) would have a lot less job security!
How a Burning Bush Sparked a Series
Bringing this series to life required a miracle of its own—or at least an unplanned pitch. Producers Carol Mendelsohn and Julie Weitz, stars of such secular hits as CSI, did not have biblical TV drama on their to-do list. “Julie gave me one instruction, ‘We can talk about all of our projects but do not talk about the Bible,’” Mendelsohn recalls of that fateful Fox meeting. But when Fox president Michael Thorn asked about her passion project, inspiration struck. “It was like I was hit by the burning bush!”
Their pivot to scripture-based drama may surprise diehard CSI fans, but, as Weitz adds, “Everything that we do together comes from characters that we fall deeply in love with and we love to do stories about women.” The wild success of The Chosen, another faith-based series, helped nudge them toward revisiting ancient ground with new eyes.
With Echevarria penning the scripts, the team realized that “giving two hours to each of these matriarchs and telling that story… is the genesis of not just Judaism, but Islam and Christianity, the three largest, most prominent religions of mankind.”
The Stories Between the Verses
While these biblical accounts are centuries old, fleshing out the women at their core was key—and required a touch of midrash, the Jewish tradition of reading between the scriptural lines. With input from both Christian and Jewish scholars, The Faithful lets each matriarch’s emotions, choices, and conflicts breathe.
In the opener, Sarah (Minnie Driver) faces her infertility—and her faith—head-on, volunteering her former Egyptian slave Hagar (Natacha Karam) to bear a child with husband Abraham (Jeffrey Donovan). Driver believes Sarah is deeply relatable: “She was just a woman who wanted to have a baby, loved her husband very much and was very strong.” Donovan unpacks the weight behind Genesis 16: “The complex struggles that these three people must have had that people today are still having 4,000 years later? We’re still going, ‘I can’t have a baby. Let’s have her have our baby. But do you like her? Is she better than me?’”
Abraham’s conversations with God presented unique acting challenges. Donovan spent solemn hours under an on-set tree (tunics and all), contemplating what it would mean for a humble shepherd to get a once-in-a-lifetime message from the heavens.
But it’s not all patriarchal angst—the complicated dynamic between Sarah and Hagar gets rare airtime. Hagar, initially Sarah’s slave, becomes both collaborator and rival. Karam says, “Originally, the relationship is defined by hierarchy and necessity and then there’s this complicated dependence that bounds them together for life.” Where previous retellings blamed the women, this adaptation opts for empathy.
Bible Drama, Modern Resonance
The second installment, airing March 29, brings Rebekah (Alexa Davalos) into the fold. She, too, waits years for children and receives a direct message from God about her twin sons’ destiny. The resulting tension nearly pulls her family apart in her zeal to fulfill prophecy. The finale, Easter Sunday, turns its lens to the rivalry between sisters Leah (Millie Brady) and Rachel (Blu Hunt), both of whom capture the affection of Jacob (Tom Payne). This love triangle is, in Echevarria’s words, “a little more scandalous but certainly contemporary.”
Faith-inspired programming is having its moment, with audiences devouring everything from The Chosen to House of David to the perennial replay of The Ten Commandments. As actress Karam muses, perhaps it’s the world’s turbulent state driving viewers to dramas where light, hope, and meaning might finally break through: “These are stories about people who are in the middle of impossible circumstances, who can’t see what the lesson is yet, or whether there’s light on the other side.”
Echevarria sums up what sets The Faithful apart: “We do have this extraordinary IP and this different perspective. Our hope is that ours will always be a little different and we’d come at it from a different angle.”
So make room on your screens and, dare we say, in your hearts: these matriarchs aren’t just holding up tents, they’re holding up generations—and still stirring a little drama, even four millennia later.
