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    The Streaming Rush to Turn Scripture Into Scripts

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    After the success of “The Chosen,” Amazon and Netflix are converting Bible stories into films and TV shows with “Game of Thrones”-style intrigue and romantic comedy elements.A once-beloved king slips into madness as wary confidants surround him, breathless for his next maneuver.A soldier wrestles with his dueling loyalties toward family and friendship.A young man from a humble background defeats a brute, not knowing that the victory sets him on a path to ascend into power.With its interpersonal intrigue and battlefield bloodshed, “House of David” looks like it could be an alternate-universe of “Game of Thrones.” But rather than an adaptation of a high fantasy franchise from the 1990s, its source material goes back millenniums.“House of David,” a series that premiered on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday, tells the story of David, the biblical shepherd who used a sling and stone to defeat the giant Goliath before assuming King Saul’s throne. It is part of the original faith-based programming that streaming services are unveiling to court the viewers who have made “The Chosen,” a prestige drama about the life of Jesus Christ, one of the most successful crowdfunded television or film projects of all time.“The sheer size of the audience is enormous,” said Jon Erwin, who pitched “House of David” to Amazon and co-directed several of the first season’s eight episodes. “It is the largest underserved niche audience in the world.”Viewership figures from streaming shows are rarely made public, but the team behind “The Chosen” estimates that the show has been watched by more than 280 million unique viewers worldwide, a third of whom it says are not religious. The hit show feels more like a workplace comedy-drama, a version of “The West Wing” set in Galilee, than the direct evangelism of the widely translated “The Jesus Film” (1979) or the storybook sermons of the 1990s animated series “VeggieTales.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Katy Perry and Gayle King Are Among Blue Origin’s All-Female Space Crew

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      They will be aboard the New Shepard, the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, in a launch this spring.The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin.Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date has been announced for the launch. It will also include Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer; Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, who is Mr. Bezos’ fiancée and a helicopter pilot.The company has garnered attention for its flights by including celebrities or highlighting new milestones in spaceflight.The spring launch will be the 11th flight carrying passengers and the 31st mission overall for New Shepard. The suborbital rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon.Flights on the fully reusable vehicle last just over 10 minutes and take participants to an altitude higher than 62 miles. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, by contrast, orbit about 250 miles above the Earth.Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men on the planet, was among the first passengers on New Shepard in 2021, the year of Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Amazon Gains Creative Control Over the James Bond Franchise

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      The British family that has for decades held complete control over everything involving the globe-trotting superspy is relinquishing it to Amazon.The British family that has steered the James Bond franchise for more than 60 years, zealously protecting the superspy from the indignities of Hollywood strip mining, has agreed to relinquish control to Amazon.The deal, which was announced Thursday morning, comes after a behind-the-scenes standoff between Barbara Broccoli, who inherited control of Bond from her father, and Amazon, which gained a significant ownership stake in the franchise in 2021 as part of its $8.5 billion purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ms. Broccoli and her brother, Michael G. Wilson, another Bond producer, had chafed at some of the ways in which Amazon hoped to capitalize on the property, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.In a statement released by Amazon, the siblings and the tech giant said they had agreed to form a new joint venture to house Bond; the parties will remain co-owners. But Amazon MGM Studios “will gain creative control” after the transaction closes later this year. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson previously had ironclad creative control, deciding when to make a new Bond film, who should play the title role and whether remakes and television spinoffs got made.They also had final say over every line of dialogue, every casting decision, every stunt sequence, every marketing tie-in, and every TV ad, poster and billboard.Daniel Craig in “No Time to Die.” The movie marked the end of a five-film series with him in the lead role. No decisions have been made about a successor.Nicola Dove/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, via Associated PressMike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, thanked the siblings for their “unyielding dedication” to the franchise and said the company looked forward “to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      A Brisk and Juicy Australian Family Drama

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      A nimble mini-series on Amazon crams a lot of believable texture and chemistry into a tidy package, with just six 15-minute episodes.The actual title of this Australian mini mini-series isn’t printable, but it is available on Amazon Prime Video under the title “F*%#ing Adelaide.” The show is just six 15-minute episodes, but it crams in plenty of story and depth, a travel-size version of the sunny but textured family drama in which adult siblings come to a new understanding of their childhoods — and thus themselves and one another.Eli (Brendan Maclean) is a would-be glam rocker, playing marginal afternoon gigs and scrapping with bartenders. He reluctantly returns home to Adelaide after an insistent phone call from his mother, Maude (Pamela Rabe). His older sister, Emma (Kate Box), has also been summoned, with her family, from her nonprofit work in Thailand. His younger sister, Kitty (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), is somewhat distracted from the family reunion by the anonymous sex she likes to have, however contrived or inconvenient it may be.Maude declares that she is selling the house, which resurrects everyone else’s feelings about their abusive, now-absent father. All the planets here are in different orbits, though. Kitty doesn’t even remember the guy, and she yearns for a connection, despite what everyone else says. Eli and Emma recoil from the mere mention of his name, and Maude’s various storage boxes suggest she is hanging onto more than just stuff. Despite its short run time, “Adelaide” gets in some juicy squabbles, and the chemistry among the adult siblings has a fun edge and a barely contained feral physicality. The house feels too full, the boxes stacked too high, the bathroom always occupied.“Adelaide” takes a surprising turn in its final two episodes, one that cannily changes the weight of the previous four. The show also weaves in Eli’s style of looping music, in which certain lines and syllables from the dialogue are remixed as breathy songs. The resulting omnipresent score is sometimes poignant but also sometimes like being around a draining 9-year-old who is discovering the pleasures of recreational echolalia.I know what you’re thinking: Is there a gender-nonconforming tween magician in this show? And the answer is, You know it, baby. Cleo (Aud Mason-Hyde), Kate’s child, gets some of the best scenes. In one, Cleo and Maude are playing a guessing game, with Maude describing the attributes of the person she has in mind. Cleo guesses Kitty, and then Emma, and then Eli, but oh! Maude is describing herself. Somewhere, a shrink is buying a new couch. More

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      in Television

      Margo Martindale Pours It On in ‘The Sticky’

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      The esteemed character actress has spent decades enlivening films and series in just a few scenes or episodes. In this new Amazon heist comedy, she is first on the call sheet.Let’s say you need a woman who can slit someone’s throat, who can poison someone’s whiskey, who can smash her son’s fingers with a hammer, who can commit armed robbery with precision and glee. Perhaps you are responsible for “The Sticky,” a new Amazon heist comedy, premiering on Dec. 6, and you require an actress who can reliably crash most of a maple tree through the glass doors of a provincial office building.Then you should absolutely call the three-time Emmy winner Margo Martindale.So it was a mild shock, one morning in mid November, to find Martindale — just back from Toronto, where she is shooting a Richard LaGravenese series — tucked away at a tasteful Manhattan brunch spot. A further surprise: Martindale, 73, has lived nearby since 1978. She arrived for breakfast looking elegant in a black-and-white caftan, the picture of an Upper West Side matron, a matron without a sizable body count.“I am a wimp,” Martindale confessed as she pushed some eggs around her plate. “I’m scared of my own shadow. I’m afraid of the dark.” Those dangerous women? That’s acting.An esteemed character actress — in the Netflix animated comedy “Bojack Horseman,” in which she voiced a felonious version of herself, she was typically introduced as “Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale” — she has spent the last two decades playing a deluxe assortment of baddies, women with steel wool and spite where their hearts should be. She’ll often show up for only a few scenes in a movie or a handful of episodes on a show, just long enough to make the extremes of human behavior seem wholly plausible.In “The Sticky,” Martindale plays a farmer seeking revenge on the bureaucrats trying to take her farm.Jan Thijs/Amazon StudiosBut in “The Sticky,” she is the star of the series, first on the call sheet. Martindale plays Ruth Landry, a reluctant maple syrup farmer who plots to steal millions of dollars of syrup from the bureaucrats who are trying to seize her farm. (Landry is an invented character, but the series is based — very loosely — on actual events.) To hear her tell it, Martindale approached this lead the same as she would any of her character parts — all acting should be character work, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Amazon Is Phasing Out Its Freevee Streaming Service

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      Its shows have moved to Amazon Prime, where they will remain free.Amazon is folding Freevee, its ad-supported streaming service, into Prime Video, where its shows will remain free to viewers who don’t subscribe to Prime.The move had been expected, after Amazon started including advertisements this year on Prime Video, which already hosts free original programs and movies. All Freevee programming will be available on Prime Video for free, the company said.Freevee began in 2019 as IMDb TV, an offshoot of Amazon’s IMDb film site. Some of its original shows were hits, including the social media sensation “Jury Duty,” “Bosch: Legacy” and “Judy Justice.” The service will be phased out within weeks.Amazon already has a streaming behemoth in Prime Video, and the company decided to put all of its entertainment content on one platform “to deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said Wednesday.An ad-supported version of Prime Video is included with Amazon’s delivery service, which costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year. An ad-free version of Prime Video is also available for an additional $2.99 per month. A stand-alone streaming subscription costs $8.99 per month.Like most streamers, Amazon mostly declines to give viewing numbers, but Freevee had built up its audience to about 65 million monthly active users in the United States in the first half of 2022. Amazon Prime has at least 180 million users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.“Judy Justice,” starring Judge Judith Sheindlin, known as Judge Judy, quickly became Freevee’s No. 1 original show when it debuted in 2021. Viewers watched more than 150 million hours of it over its first two years, according to Amazon data. Judge Sheindlin’s success in her first streaming show allowed her to spin off additional shows on Freevee.Freevee’s most unexpected hit, however, was “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors. It became Freevee’s most-watched show after it premiered in 2023 and earned four Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding comedy series.“Bosch: Legacy,” which premiered in 2022, was based on the popular police detective book series by Michael Connelly. It became a New York Times Critic’s Pick, with the reviewer Mike Hale writing that the series came with “cleverly interlocking story lines and the general lack of pretense and contrivance.”Other free, ad-supported streaming platforms, like Pluto TV, Tubi, and Roku Channel, have enjoyed significant growth. Viewers have flocked to them as many other subscription-based streaming services raised their prices. While the free services are built on a stable of older TV programs and movies, many consumers are seeking cost savings, nostalgia and even terrible movies.There are at least 170 million ad-supported subscriptions in the United States, up from at least 93 million at the end of last year, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. More

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      in Television

      ‘Cross’ and ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Offer Different Spins on the Same Formula

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      Within the boundaries of the crime-solving genius genre, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang.On the page, Alex Cross, the embittered psychologist created by James Patterson, leads his fellow fictional crime solver Mickey Haller, the flamboyant lawyer created by Michael Connelly, 32 novels to seven. On the small screen, the tables turn: The Haller series “The Lincoln Lawyer” debuted its third season last month on Netflix while the first season of “Cross,” announced nearly five years ago, finally arrives Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.But who’s counting? There appears to be endless space in the current marketplace for brilliant but wounded investigators, and Haller and Cross share an essential marker of the contemporary crime-drama hero. Their personal traumas — Cross’s loss of his parents and wife, Haller’s issues with his father and with addiction — generate much of the tension in their stories, reducing the need for real complexity of personality or the clever unraveling of mystery.Formulas can be executed in different ways, however, and the two shows provide radically different viewing experiences. Within the boundaries of the problematic-genius formula, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang. “Cross” goes for self-consciously heavy, “The Lincoln Lawyer” for perilously light. Most significant, perhaps, “Cross” is out to sanctify its protagonist; “The Lincoln Lawyer,” while it provides Haller with a full allotment of anguish, never asks us to feel sorry for him.The creator of “Cross,” Ben Watkins, previously created the eccentric neo-noir “Hand of God,” also for Amazon. The penchants he demonstrated then for hair-raising imagery, and for throwing together tones and styles, carry through to the new show. Choosing not to base “Cross” on a specific Patterson novel (unlike film adaptations including “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”), Watkins frees himself to cook up a lurid but not very exciting stew of serial-killer horror, buddy-cop action, social-justice point-making and sentimentality.Cross, played by Aldis Hodge (“Leverage”), is a District of Columbia police detective with a Ph.D. in psychology. We meet him on the occasion of his wife’s murder, and for eight episodes the character shuttles between dour grief and bellowing anger; Hodge, usually a magnetic performer, settles on a glaring, unmediated intensity.The A plot, in which Cross investigates the murder of a defund-the-police activist, blossoms into a richly nonsensical “Silence of the Lambs”-style fantasia. Common sense is left far behind, in matters large and small; at one slap-your-forehead juncture, a cop yells, “He could be anywhere!” seconds after the killer escapes, while his car can still be heard in the near distance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Small Streamers Like Hallmark+ and BritBox See Subscribers Surge

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      Like Christmas shows? So does Hallmark+. Like horror? Dare to try Shudder. And British shows? There’s BritBox and more.Executives from the Hallmark Channel made a curious decision this fall: They started a new streaming service.It seemed like an awfully late date to do so. Most media companies entered the streaming fray years ago, and few have had success going head-to-head against titans like Netflix, Amazon and Disney.But Hallmark executives decided the timing was not an issue. Their app, Hallmark+, did not need to appeal to the whole country, they said, just their core audience — the people who regularly flock en masse to the network’s trademark holiday and feel-good programming.“We don’t have to make content that are all things to all people,” said John Matts, Hallmark Media’s chief operating officer.He might very well be onto something.For much of the past decade, conventional wisdom inside the entertainment world has been that only a small handful of megaservices would survive the streaming wars. After all, they had the stars, the budgets and the technological prowess.But numerous media executives now believe that there could be room for some more modest streaming services, too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Culte’ Is a Fascinating Romp Through the Dawn of French Reality TV

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      A new docudrama recounts the conflicts and controversy surrounding “Loft Story,” a French twist on “Big Brother” that divided critics and generations.Anaïde Rozam stars as a reality TV creator in the French series “Culte.”AmazonThe behind-the-scenes French docudrama “Culte” (in French, with subtitles), available on Amazon Prime Video, captures the birth of reality TV in France. And like many births, it’s a messy and emotional process, with plenty of screaming and crying from multiple parties, some unhelpful meddling from the families, fits of doubt and unknown reservoirs of determination.No one is quite the same after, and then there’s this whole new being to take care of. In this case, it’s “Loft Story,” a “Big Brother” adaptation that debuted in April 2001.Isabelle (Anaïde Rozam) is a stymied TV producer, a failure in her publishing-royalty parents’ eyes. She seizes on the format of “Big Brother,” a new hit show in the Netherlands, but the bigwigs are averse to anything they deem trashy. Reality shows are “voyeuristic, macabre, mind-numbing,” says one executive. “Hellish,” another agrees. “We can’t be the nation of Chartres cathedral and 12 dummies living in an apartment.” Well … just you wait, monsieur!Isabelle vows that her show will be something politically provocative, a social experiment with participants who reflect the totality of France in age, income, ethnicity and outlook. But once the production countdown begins, some of her grander ambitions give way to what we can now see as the basis of most reality casting: Round up some sexy drama llamas, and let the cameras roll. No one is prepared for what unfolds — the fame, the derision, the ratings bonanza.Over its six episodes, “Culte” moves with speed and agility — and, praise God, only one timeline — and its characters’ maneuverings are just as loaded and occasionally backstabby as any reality villain’s. The apparently nationwide hand-wringing about the dangers of lowbrow entertainment feel quaint, almost darling. “Does French TV still have morals?” someone wonders.But lurid tabloid stories have a way of setting the conversation, and TV networks are rarely in the morality business; they’re in the ratings business. “The Americans have a term for this,” a network head says, his eyes agleam. “‘Buzz.’” “Loft Story” indeed puts every apiary to shame.“Culte” makes the most of its festive, exciting ambiguities, and the “Loft” folks do not try to occupy a moral high-ground, nor could they really. They merely wander the bumpy natural topologies of society, and maybe no one is much higher or lower than anyone else. More