Netflix’s The Chosen One seems ripe for a biblical backlash – so why haven’t Christians cried blasphemy?

Netflix’s new Spanish-language drama follows a Mexican boy who comes to believe he’s the second coming of Jesus. There’s been a surprising lack of backlash from the Christian community, notes Louis Chilton – it goes to show that religion shouldn’t always be handled with po-faced reverence

The son of God? Bobby Luhnow as the miraculous Jodie in ‘The Chosen One' (Carla Danieli/Netflix)

The Chosen One, Netflix’s new coming-of-age supernatural drama, begins with a scene of wrenching violence. A man is in a frenzy, attacking a woman we later come to know as Sarah (Glee’s Dianna Agron). In the foreground, a baby cries in distress. Sarah fights back and manages to escape her attacker. With child in tow, she drives towards the border and the Baja California peninsula in Mexico. She is stopped by a cop car. The officer IDs her, calls for backup. We watch the baby; the pupils of his eyes seem to dilate. The cop changes his mind. “It’s not the suspect.”

While fans of George Lucas’s Star Wars might mistake this interaction for some kind of Jedi mind trick, the actual explanation is altogether more spiritual: the baby, Jodie, is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. At least, that’s what Jodie comes to believe, after he begins performing miracles as an adolescent (played by Bobby Luhnow). In this way, The Chosen One is a bolshie, gripping and commendably well-made rewriting of the Christian myth – specifically, the fundamentalist belief that Christ will walk the Earth again in corporeal form. This is, you would imagine, somewhat dicey subject matter for a TV show. From the mocking satire of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian to the labyrinthine conspiracies of The Da Vinci Code, films and series that take liberties with Christian doctrine have often provoked considerable outrage. And yet, somehow, The Chosen One has escaped this fate. It has managed to walk a near-impossible tightrope – telling a punchy and modern moral fable in a way that doesn’t besmirch its own religious underpinnings.

The lack of backlash from the Christian community is perhaps doubly surprising when you consider previous attempts to adapt the work of Mark Millar, the Scottish comic book writer behind American Jesus, the fiction upon which The Chosen One is based. Millar’s oeuvre includes the revisionist superhero comic Kick-Ass, the zany Bond spoof Kingsmen, and the morbid Wolverine story Old Man Logan (adapted into 2017’s Logan). Kick-Ass in particular proved contentious thanks to scenes of violence and foul language involving then-preteen star Chloë Grace Moretz; Kingsman faced opprobrium for a crude final punchline about anal sex.

All signs pointed to the fact that Millar would be unable to handle a concept as complicated – and, for many, sacred – as Christian eschatology. And to some degree, this was true: from this very first scene of the mind-bending baby, The Chosen One opts to milk its religious premise for irreverent twists and supernatural thrills. But beneath this pulpy veneer, there is something earnest: a sincere – and, in today’s pop-cultural climate, rare – conviction that the bible-bashers are onto something. At times, the series adopts a Stranger Things-esque air of supernatural jeopardy. But it also affirms, unambiguously, the core facets of evangelical belief. Jesus is real, as is the antichrist; miracles are possible.

It helps too, maybe, that Millar himself is a Christian, and last week hit back on social media against claims that the book was playing with ecclesiastical fire. “This story is treated absolutely straight. It’s a serious drama,” he wrote. “The subject matter is handled cleverly and respectfully [...] It’s neither making light nor making fun.” Millar, who also produced the series, has a point. The Chosen One cannot be accused of being anti-religious. If anything, it is completely credulous in its depiction of Christian resurrection. It takes the gospel as gospel.

I’d go so far as to say that Christians have cause to be delighted with The Chosen One. It has managed to tackle overtly Christian ideas in a way that seems neither preachy or artificial. Some genuinely terrific cinematography helps lend the series a sense of classiness: much of the show is framed in striking 4:3 aspect ratio (often known as “box” or “academy” ratio). Underneath, there is always this lingering hum of sensationalism – the feeling that something solid and devout has been pureed into light entertainment. But maybe that’s fine. Not everything has to be The Ten Commandments.

The chosen one: Netflix’s new drama focuses on a boy who begins to believe he is the messiah (Carla Danieli/Netflix)

Maybe the real reason that The Chosen One has flown under the radar of religious scandal is more prosaic – too few people have watched it. In the UK, the series currently sits at No 7 on the Netflix TV charts. It’s too early to lose faith: foreign-language series typically take longer to find an audience here, and are more reliant on strong word of mouth. That should manifest, because The Chosen One is a consummate piece of television. It goes to show that religion shouldn’t always be handled with po-faced reverence: sometimes, it’s OK to let sensitivity be damned.

‘The Chosen One’ is streaming now on Netflix