No one really shines, and everyone in the cast appears resigned to let their chintzy-looking costumes do most of the work. Which is just the beginning of the aesthetic problems of the show, with laughable CGI, empty-feeling sets, and a general feeling of laziness. Attempts at “epic” sweeping shots only reinforce the alien falseness of the world and simply don’t fly in a post-Game of Thrones landscape. Combined with the devout over-acting on display in nearly every character on screen, and the show comes off less as a big event series airing on a major holiday and more like a high school play.
It’s hard for me to fully pile onto something that isn’t directly targeted at me (and for which I haven’t seen the, technically speaking, first season of), but as the credits rolled after the premiere’s “cliffhanger” ending, I found myself wondering: who is the target audience for this? Christians, obviously, but anyone savvy enough to have seen a TV show in the last half decade will know, religiously inclined or not, that A.D. The Bible Continues is not a good hour of television.
And for everyone else, do they really need another version of a story they no doubt know by heart told to them in such a rudimentary way? As someone who’s paid to see all four Transformers movies on opening weekend, I guess I’ve already answered my own question. The show is simply too afraid to do anything drastic or new with the material, shooting for a playing-it-safe middle-ground that exchanges inspiration for inoffensiveness.
At the end of the day, this is perhaps the most futile TV series for any person to pen a review for, with masses of eye-rollers scrolling past tweets related to the show without a second glance, and the other group not needing further conviction to watch. As someone whose job it is to simply describe their experience with a show, I’ll end with this: A.D. The Bible Continues plays it so straight that fans of the previous series, and its original source material, will no doubt enjoy Jesus and company’s continuing misadventures (though they deserve better, no matter how oblivious), and literally all others need not apply.
