‘The Faithful’ Gives Biblical Women More Voice—But Not More Depth

With The Chosen leading the way, we seem to be entering a golden age of Bible prestige television. A recent entry is Fox’s The Faithful, a three-part miniseries that retells the ancestral narratives of Genesis with a focus on the perspectives of woman. While the series at times pushes the envelope on melodrama, it also sincerely grapples with the complexities of these biblical stories. The three-part series, which aired its final episode on Easter Sunday, offers explanations for why characters make the choices they do, but it also doesn’t gloss over the troubled relationships and flawed personalities of the biblical text.

Episode 1 begins with a meet-cute. We first encounter Sarai (renamed Sarah after a visit from God midway through the episode) and Abram in a Haran marketplace. Before they were the covenant ancestors of the Israelites, Sarai and Abram were an aspiring romantic couple, at least as viewed through the lens of The Faithful. Sarai asks about a teal shawl at a market stand and looks crestfallen when she hears the price. But after walking away, someone calls her name, and she turns around to see Abram waving the shawl at her and grinning. She wears this shawl throughout the episode and is buried with it at the conclusion.

This extra-biblical scene serves as a great example of a strategy the series uses frequently, and one that has a long history in biblical television and film adaptations: gap-filling. The stories of the Bible (and Genesis in particular) introduce us to a host of characters who are painted in broad strokes, often without the kinds of details we’re used to receiving as consumers of modern media. So when filmmakers translate the stories to the screen, they add new scenes to help establish the characters and their relationships, as well as fill in parts of the plot that don’t quite make sense.

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This practice has a long and rich history, from silent film (such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 The King of Kings, which provides an extensive backstory for Mary Magdalene) to classic biblical epics of Hollywood (like the 1953 David and Bathsheba). Extra-biblical scenes also provide the foundation for The Chosen, the enormously successful series that centers the experiences of Jesus’ disciples.

In The Faithful, this opening scene gives a romantic flavor to Sarai and Abram’s marriage and also establishes what will come to be one of Sarai’s defining characteristics: her refusal to bow to any man. In one of the occasional awkward nods to contemporary gender relationships, Abram admires this trait of Sarai and incorporates it into his marriage proposal to her. He asks her to be his wife, not to serve him but to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder together, whatever life might bring.” This phrase recurs throughout the episode, often as an eye-rolling melodramatic flourish. These extra biblical scenes provide an emotional connection for the audience, but also offer an interpretation of the characters: extrapolating from the few instances in which Sarai gives Abram an order (or laughs after God makes a promise), The Faithful recasts her as a modern-day independent woman—a thin, almost symbolic nod to feminism, pitching her more at the level of a Disney princess than a biblical matriarch.

But perhaps more interesting is when the series offers justifications, sometimes bordering on apologetics, for the more questionable behavior of these characters in the biblical story. Sarai, in particular, is a troubling figure in Genesis for her treatment of Hagar, a servant whom Sarai tasks with producing a child for her and Abram. In the biblical narrative, Sarai is not simply longing for a child in the abstract, but determined to fulfill God’s promise: that Abram’s descendants will become a great people and that a covenantal future will unfold through his line. When she and Abram are unable to conceive, Sarai tells her husband to have a child with Hagar, seemingly without thought for how Hagar would experience this. Then, when Sarai’s own promised child is born, she sends Hagar and her child into the desert, effectively casting them out to die.

It’s often hard to sympathize with Sarai in the book of Genesis; The Faithful presents a determined, much more compassionate figure. The series explains her decisions in a number of ways. For one, Hagar is given more agency about her procreative relationship with Abram, and as a whole, Hagar and Sarai have a stronger relationship; what comes across as a demand to a slave in the biblical text feels more like a desperate request to a friend in The Faithful.

It’s often hard to sympathize with Sarai in the book of Genesis; The Faithful presents a determined, much more compassionate figure.

Further, Sarai is painfully aware that her husband has conversations with God from which she is excluded. Her husband has reported to her for years that God has promised them a son who will found the nation of Israel, but when no child is forthcoming, she presses him on God’s precise language. Eventually, Abram concedes that, yes, God said it would be his son, not necessarily hers. So Sarai’s suggestion that Abram should conceive a child with Hagar is not viewed through the lens of cruelty or lack of faith, but as a sincere effort on Sarai’s behalf to understand the promise God has given and to do what she can to ensure its fulfillment.

It’s difficult not to compare The Faithful to The Chosen. The Chosen is structured through a number of interlocking plots and characters, stretching out over multiple episodes and seasons; in contrast, the almost movie-length episodes of The Faithful are more or less complete in themselves. While The Chosen largely succeeds in creating a living, breathing world around Jesus and the disciples, The Faithful falls short of this goal, largely as a result of its attempts to cram these rather lengthy stories of Genesis into 85-minute blocks. The world seems thinner, the additions to the biblical stories more transparent attempts to solve problems than explorations of characters’ inner lives.

Further, while the series emphasizes the strength and agency of these women, it is opaque about the precise reasons we should admire them. Are they examples of strong women struggling against the unfair patriarchal system into which they were born, or simply admirable models of obedience and sacrifice for contemporary women to follow? This vagueness seems like an effort to appeal to audiences of both conservative and progressive leanings; each is given reason to admire these women within the confines of their own worldview.

The series’ main success lies in its framing. It continues the tradition of biblical retelling in film by foregrounding the experiences of these biblical women and presenting them as trying to remain faithful in the midst of their flawed and messy lives. But it doesn’t always succeed in making them as three-dimensional as we might like them to be. So while The Faithful acknowledges the original stories’ complexities, it still struggles to imagine its characters as more than plucky heroine types.

The Faithful is now streaming on Hulu.