The Promised Land season one to start shooting this fall
The comedy series, about Moses leading the Israelites in the wilderness, will shoot the rest of its first season in October and November.
A quick update on The Promised Land, the upcoming Office-style comedy series about Moses leading the Israelites in the wilderness:
It was announced this week that the series, which currently consists of a single pilot episode released last month, will shoot the rest of its first season in October and November. The announcement was made via social media, press release, and a video that played on YouTube last night, in which writer-director Mitch Hudson and two of his producers answered questions from the pilot episode’s fans.
A few quick bullet points:
The first season will consist of six episodes (including the pilot), and it has a budget of $5 million (though I don’t know if that includes the pilot, or if it’s just for the five episodes that have yet to be filmed).
Episode 2 will pick up right after the events of the pilot episode.
The pilot episode basically covered the events of Exodus 15-18, and it ended with the Israelites “just a few days’ travel” from Mount Sinai.
The second episode could start where Exodus 19 does, with the Israelites arriving at Mount Sinai, but Hudson suggested in last night’s video that he might explore the bit in Exodus 18:25 first, which says that Moses delegated certain leadership roles before the Israelites got to Mount Sinai.
The pilot episode didn’t really show Moses delegating those roles to the extent that that passage suggests—with individuals assuming responsibility for groups of a thousand, a hundred, fifty, and ten—but Hudson said the restructuring of Israelite leadership described in that passage “sets them up for [when] they arrive at Mount Sinai”. So maybe Episode 2 will take place between Exodus 18 and 19 so it can explore that a little more.
The season finale will apparently depict the golden-calf incident from Exodus 32.
The biblical version of that story ends on a pretty brutal note—with God sending a plague against the Israelites, Moses telling the Levites to slaughter thousands of their fellow Israelites at random, and Moses grinding the golden calf into a powder and forcing the Israelites to drink it—but this is a comedy series, so it will be interesting to see how it approaches all that.
Hudson said in last night’s video that the golden-calf story is the one he’s looking forward to filming the most this season, tonal challenges and all: “I think everything with the buildup to the golden calf moment is going to be a lot of fun. I think the way that we’re going to be adapting that story, and the way that we’re going to set it up, and the fact that Aaron is in charge and Moses is gone and everyone is trying to figure that out, and where that all leads to— I think it’s going to be extremely fun to watch, slash, it’ll hurt at times but it will also be just very interesting, kind of the way that we’re going to put all that together. So that’s what I’m the most excited to film.”
Hudson hopes to shoot 40 episodes in total over the course of the series, and he plans to make a feature film that would be an “origin story” set in Egypt.
The series will be filmed in St George, Utah, partly because the producers were hoping to shoot in a place that had “red rocks”.
The producers only learned after the fact that St George happens to be one of the filming locations for Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga.
Yes, The Promised Land does share a number of cast members with The Chosen, but The Promised Land actually got most of those actors first!
The one exception is Wasim No’mani, who had already played a Pharisee named Yanni on two seasons of The Chosen before he was cast as Moses in The Promised Land. The other actors who appear in both shows didn’t make their Chosen debuts until Season 4, which was filmed after The Promised Land’s pilot episode.
The fact that so many actors are in both shows isn’t a coincidence, though. Hudson has been an assistant director on The Chosen from the beginning, and he showed a rough cut of The Promised Land’s pilot episode to The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins before Season 4 of that show was filmed. The rest, as they say, is history.
Hudson and his producers expect to have their first season ready to release by “next summer”, but they do not yet know how it will be released.
Here is the video that streamed last night (the thumbnail calls it a “livestream”, but it looks to me like it was pre-recorded, with video clips inserted, etc.):