House of David – how much of the story will it tell?
The photos that came out this week are apparently tied to specific episodes, and together they give us a sense of the first season's narrative arc.
Spoiler alert: Don’t read this if you don’t want to know which episodes in the first season of House of David will probably feature certain key events from the Bible.
Just a quick addendum to my post about the newly-released photos from House of David, the upcoming Prime Video series about King Saul and David.
I said yesterday that the photos don’t really give us any new information, and that’s still basically true: we already knew who the main actors would be, and we already knew who most of them would be playing. But the filenames on the photos—which I didn’t reproduce in my post yesterday—tell us a little bit more than that.
Each of the photos came with metadata that identified not just who the actors were but which episode each photo is from. And based on that info, we can say this:
Samuel will anoint David in Episode 3.
David will meet Saul’s daughter Mychal no later than Episode 4.
The Philistine king Achish will lead his men on horseback in Episode 7.
David will confront Goliath in Episode 8.
This intrigues me, as the biblical David is anointed in I Samuel 16 and then fights Goliath just one chapter later, in I Samuel 17. It would appear, then, that six of the season’s eight episodes will be based on just two chapters in I Samuel.
For comparison, the 2016 series Of Kings & Prophets put the anointing of David at the end of its second episode, and then killed Goliath in the third episode… and then it compressed the rest of I Samuel (chapters 18-31) into the next six episodes.
I always thought Of Kings & Prophets zipped through the story a little too quickly, but I wonder if House of David might be going through it a little too slowly. Suffice it to say there’s going to be a lot of dramatic invention here, in any case.
Also, given that David isn’t even mentioned in the Bible until his anointing, I wonder how big a part of the first two episodes he’ll be. It’s his name in the title, after all. I imagine they’ll invent a story around his killing of a bear or a lion, since we know he’s going to talk to Saul about that eventually (I Samuel 17:34-37).
Meanwhile, I note that the IMDb not only says the first season will have eight episodes, it also says Prime Video will release the first three episodes on February 27 and then it will release the next five episodes weekly, until April 3.
This is a fairly standard release pattern for Prime Video, which sometimes releases entire seasons all at once and sometimes doesn’t.
It also means the season will still be unfolding when The Chosen Season 5 begins its four-week theatrical run on March 27, and it means the season will conclude just a week or so before The King of Kings comes out on April 11. Expect to see think-pieces about the flood of biblical “content”… especially if the series is a hit.