It premieres in Spanish and in Spain the fourth season of the television series The Chosen, starring Catholic actor Jonathan Roumie as Jesus, in an audiovisual phenomenon that breaks records.
A way of seeing The Chosen It is free to download The Chosen App: they have downloaded it 20 million people. The series has 10 million followers on social networks. Another way is to enter the RTVE website (Spanish Television), where the First season. There are sources who suspect that it is one of the most viewed products in RTVE’s online offering.
In addition, Seasons 1, 2 and 3 can be seen on the payment platforms Movistar+ and Acontra+. It is one of the most watched soap operas in the history of television.
These days the episodes of Season 4 in Spanish from Spain are released on YouTube, but they will remain there for only a few days. It will be at: https://www.youtube.com/@thechosentves
The first three seasons of The Chosen soon They will be dubbed in more than 50 languages. He also wants to be in the future the most translated in the world, into 600 different languages. Spectators’ donations contributed almost 100 million dollars for the 4 seasonsalthough now it raises funds in many other ways.
Because The Chosen hook many?
The truth is that watching a daily or weekly episode of Chosen It is friendly, pleasant and even relaxing. Although the fourth season begins to get dark, in most episodes we know what we are going to find: We are going to spend an hour with old friends, the apostles. Let’s see Jesus leaving us fascinated to new characters. “Well done, Jesus,” we say, because we are already one of His and we travel with Him. We know that This hour we will see some beautiful miracle. And we will get to know a little more about each of the friends we traveled with, and we will make some new friends.
The first episodes of the first season are the weakest and slowest. But it quickly gains in complexity and humanity, by adding “chosen ones” to the plot. There’s nothing wrong with starting the series with episode 4 or the second season. The music, the work of the actors and the increasingly daring narrative scripts (with forays into the Old Testament or the characters’ past) They make this series increasingly robust.
chosen It’s a long soap opera. He wants to have seven seasons. It’s not a rushed two-hour movie. The Chosen He has time to calmly explain the story of Jesus and his friends. That is new, That had not happened before in the audiovisual world. And it creates complicity with the viewer, like so many other long soap operas.
The “chosen ones” have real lives, each one
The apostles are no longer a confused troupe: each of them we recognize because of their face, their clothes, their history, their traumas… They are the Chosen Ones, and so are we who accompany them.
Another charm of The Chosen the thing is each of them has a real, previous and credible life. She had a life before Jesus, He transformed it, but They still have fines to pay and relatives to deal with. They are not allegories, nor decoration: they live, and their lives intertwine. They learn things, and undertake others. We grow with them, and so we were hooked.
Jesus has created a community with the most diverse people in Season 4 of The Chosen.
We are also fascinated by seeing the creation of the community. Those who were not people with some speed become people. “Come and see,” they say, and television is seeing!
They were reluctant strangers to each other and Now they are a town, a family, brothers. Our young people are fascinated by that., because many do not have siblings, and their friends are virtual. Could I live like this? many wonder, amazed.
The scouts, on the other hand, understand them: “look, like us, a lot of walking, setting up tents, living austerely in the countryside and laughing a lot”. But that is the definition of Israel and the Church, a people that walks, with the Word who “planted his tent among us.”
The Church should be that community of friends of Jesus who walk together, although each one has their quirks and weaknesses, as the film shows.
Almost all the characters are liked!
Another curious aspect of The Chosen the thing is We don’t dislike almost any character. Even the Roman soldiers, even their spies, even the Pharisees… as the series progresses, we see that everyone has something salvageable, they are all involved in some mechanism for which they are not entirely to blame, tangled in their sins and routines but ¡We wouldn’t mind if you joined our merry band! There is room for everyone.
It’s as if the series teaches us to look at them as Jesus looks, with compassion and hope. Jesus, we think, can transform them. And maybe me too.
Another strong point of The Chosen, What director Dallas Jenkins announced from the beginning, is that there would be miracles, demons and supernatural things, without psycho-sociological explanations, but faithful to the biblical text. Thus it attracted a lot of its initial crowdfunding. And, indeed, there we have miracles and healings and expulsion of demons, more than in the Gospel. And they fit very well, without creaking, because they already fit well in the texts.
Let’s now deal with the weak points of the series.
Mary and John the Baptist, weak points
The worst, which almost all Catholic viewers complain about, is the figure of the Virgin Mary. It is true that it is not mandatory that Mary has to be beautiful or beautiful, the Bible does not say anything. But she is a character that falls short and never fits us. The Catholic viewer leaves the story to think about the actress and the scriptwriters. Yes, we all know that it is difficult to give life to a human being without an inclination to sin, the Full of Grace, the Kejaritomene that the angel says.
If the writers didn’t know how to do it, it would have been better to limit his appearances. A scene in which she talks about what the birth was like, “full of dirt”, fits poorly with the virgin birth, and it was also unnecessary if he did not want to upset the Catholic public. But she doesn’t stop being an actress by telling things. Perhaps because of the complaints in this chapter, the scriptwriters avoided getting into controversies about James and Judas, the “brothers” of Jesus (cousins, according to Catholics, Orthodox, Copts and all Christendom before Luther). The series does not specify any relationship between them.
The character of John the Baptist and his contrast with Jesus is also strange, as if Jesus had to ask him for restraint and care. We know that he said that “there is no one born of a woman greater than John the Baptist” and recognized all his prophetic power, inherited from the gifts of the prophet Elijah (a topic poorly developed).
Another weak point is those dialogues and scenes that the Spanish viewer sees as “very American.” Sometimes they speak like an American evangelical congregation. Other times, like some small businessmen from the US. There is an absurd dialogue between Pedro and his wife about the time to have children or to postpone them, as if a young Jewish couple from the first century thought of something other than having many children (they seem to be unaware that “children are like arrows in the archer’s quiver”), with a modern contraceptive mentality.
The series does not understand the concept of an extended family very well, with a multitude of cousins and nephews coming and going, and more life on the street than in the houses. And there is a lot of “night” life, spending candles as if wax were free.
There’s also absurd solutions on the racial issue. It seems to them that the proportion of blacks in Judea and Galilee in the first century coincided, curiously, with that of the United States. It’s okay that Tamar is Ethiopian, but there are worse cases. In the third season we see Saint Joseph in Jesus’ childhood…and Saint Joseph is black! Sure, he’s not supposed to bring his genetics to Jesus, but didn’t that catch all the neighbors’ attention? It is absurd no matter how you look at it and falls into the modern absurd fashion of “color blind” in which anyone can play any race.
Furthermore, if we listen to the series in English, and know a little about accents, we see that some speak with a Texas accent, others Scottish, others English, others Middle Eastern or Indian, others Nigerian…a chaos of absurd accents.
Luckily, when we listened to the version on AContra+, With Spanish dubbing actors, all that disappears and a lot of credibility is gained. In addition, the AContra+ version has turned to Catholic and evangelical experts to look for translations of the biblical text that fit well with what is used in Spain, that does not resonate with strange connotations. It has merit, because evangelicals in Spain, greatly influenced by the US, have often used archaizing or Americanizing translations.
The spiritual effect
There are critics concerned about the spiritual effect of the series. Indeed, whoever watches all 7 seasons will have spent more than 60 hours with these characters and these scriptwriters, and with an open heart, since they are the stories with which God wanted to reach his children, intermingled with others, the work of the filmmakers.
Not many people spend 60 hours praying with the same icon or the same image or painting. This series – like any other – is something that can colonize the visual imagination.
The scriptwriters and directors tell us that it is only a narrative work, thatHe who wants the true Word of God turns to the Bible and whoever wants to pray with the Word of God should do so with the Bible.
But many viewers They insist that with The Chosen They have found Jesus, a Jesus, they say, “real, alive”, some detail that it is a Jesus “empathic”, a “Jesus who smiles and is close.” Others say that about the Church, that is, about the friends of Jesus.
Jonathan Roumie shares the bonfire with us in The Chosen, and that makes him a very close Jesus.
What they mean by this? They mean that They believed in Jesus but seeing him as an icon, a symbol, not someone real. Is It is different to know the King of Spain by seeing him in an office photo than to have him as a close friend. who tells you jokes and has dinner with you. Jesus wants to be our close friend, and many only know him as King in an official photo. The television series breaks that with imagination, humor, plots, scenes.
Jesus said: ““I have not called you servants, but friends.”. He wants a personal relationship. Yes, He says: “You are my friends if you do what I tell you.” But that task is only part of friendship. Friendship is interpersonal treatment, it is listening to each other, it is looking at each other and treating each other closely, it is knowing each other; It is not just serving, like the servant the master. It is not enough to have him as a boss or Lord (theoretical) but as a Brother who makes us children of the Father. Jesus is like a leader of street kids who offers his gang to enter his Father’s house, and The Chosen It shows us visually what that gang and that friendship are like.
It is true that the television series has weak points. But it is more serious that the Church offers pastoral care, sacraments, catechesis and charity and, despite that, many who go to the temple (or not) continue to see in Jesus a brand or slogan, a symbol like the photo of the King or the flag, and not a real friend who is alive.
Yeah The Chosen triumph is because it invites us to accompany them as another friend, as a disciple, at the feet of his Master, a master who smiles at us and tells us “follow me.”
Trailer for the Fourth Season: it gets darker, the prophecies of the Suffering Servant, man of sorrows…
