Exclusive: Dallas Jenkins and Jon Erwin on that new Saul-and-David series for Amazon Prime
The news about House of David happened to break on the same day as The Chosen: Season 4's world premiere, so, I had to ask the filmmakers about it while I was there.
I happened to be in Los Angeles yesterday when news broke (via Deadline) that Amazon is producing a brand new series about King Saul and David called House of David, which will stream on Prime Video.
The series was conceived by Jon Erwin, co-director of the “faith-based” hits Jesus Revolution and I Can Only Imagine, and it is being produced in partnership with The Wonder Project, the studio Erwin co-founded last month.
And why was I in Los Angeles when this news broke? Because I was taking part in the junket for The Chosen: Season 4, which held its world premiere last night.
As it happens, The Chosen writer-director Dallas Jenkins is “a large shareholder and special advisor to The Wonder Project,” as Deadline puts it, so when I saw him on the teal carpet, I had to ask if House of David had any ties to The Chosen.
This was our exchange:
There was a news story that broke, about House of David. Your name is in the story, but it’s not clear how involved you are. Are you involved? Or is it just because you’re attached to the company that’s producing it?
So, I’m involved in the sense that I’m a special advisor, and I’ve been part of the building of this company for the last couple of years, developing these plans. Whether or not House of David is going to be connected to The Chosen, we don’t know yet. We’re still talking through that. My job, for them, is to just help, advise, and to work with Jon and Kelly [Merryman Hoogstraten] on this. So we’re excited about multiple projects that are happening with them, but they know, their investors know, Amazon knows my primary focus is The Chosen.
Okay. Because you’ve got David flashbacks in this season—
Yes!
—and, like, there’s potential for a spin-off, or is this a separate thing?
There is potential for a spin-off, and there is potential for this to be a separate thing. Who knows? More to come.
Here is the audio of our exchange:
Later, after the Season 4 premiere, I bumped into Erwin himself in the lobby, and I got to ask him about this. If memory serves—I wasn’t recording this chat—he laughed when I asked if House of David would be a Chosen spin-off, which suggested to me that it won’t be, and he also said he expects to start shooting his series “soon”, which was a very on-brand kind of thing to say at a premiere for The Chosen.
I will have more to say about the junket later. Or “sooner”, as the case may be.
In the meantime, it’s worth noting that there was another series about Saul and David quite recently—more than one, actually:
In 2016, the ABC network produced a gritty historical drama called Of Kings & Prophets, which was canceled before the first season had even finished airing; I wrote detailed analyses of all nine episodes here.
And before that, in 2009, there was NBC’s Kings, which took place in a sort of alternate version of the present day and starred Ian McShane and Sebastian Stan as the Saul and Jonathan figures; I wrote a few comments on the pilot episode here and interviewed series creator Michael Green here.
Angel Studios also has an animated series called Young David right now, but King Saul has not appeared in it… yet. We did meet his chief shepherd, though.
So there has certainly been a flurry of interest in Saul and David lately, but all of these shows have been quite different from one another, and it will be interesting to see how Erwin’s series carves out its own little niche.
As ever, we shall see.