What Happens When You Cross The History Channel With SNL?

Zack —  March 4, 2013 — 5 Comments

Last night The History Channel aired their epic miniseries The Bible.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post based on the trailers History was using to promote the show and made the point that, though subtle, there is a highly problematic racism going on in the casting of this series wherein history is whitewashed as virtually all the heroes, good guys, and not least of all the savior, are white guys.

This past weekend Kevin Hart hosted Saturday Night Live. While it was a particularly good episode, the “Really!?! with Seth & Kevin” segment during Weekend Update did have some pretty funny lines. Coincidently, (or was it Providence?) they talked about racism.

So, after The History Channel aired their program last night, I thought to myself, “What would happen if you combined the two – SNL‘s Weekend Update segment with The History Channel’s ’The Bible Series.’”

Using the character photo gallery from The Bible Series website, which posts the main characters from the series along with a few minor ones that I had to leave out for the sake of space, I came up with the following.

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, there was one other character listed that was played by a black actor, the role of Balthazar. However, as the point I was originally making was that the lead characters, i.e. the heroes/saviors, in this program are all white, the casting of the minor characters isn’t relevant.

Anyway, I just wanted to offer something to think about as much of the evangelical world celebrates the fact that the Bible is on TV.

If nothing else, I hope it raises the question, “If this program is supposed to be historically accurate, and there are plenty of actors of the historically accurate ethnicity to play the given lead roles, why were all those lead roles instead given to white guys?”

TheBible-SNL2

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  • D Lowrey

    As you pointed out here and earlier about this series…it is overtly racist. The problem is that you have two wealthy Hollywood insiders who are producing this. Because they come from what I understand a fundamentalist background (wanting to get the Bible back into American schools)…they understand fully what type of audience they will get if the actors portrayed racially correct. The American fundamentalist crowd this is playing to would never accept actors who were racially correct. Even the mainline Baptist church I attend acts like this is going to replace the book version.

  • daryl carpenter

    So they have a black guy playing Samson, who, and let’s be blunt about it, is an unstable and violent killer who forcibly demands his conjugal rights whenever he feels it necessary:

    “I will go into my wife in the chamber” (Judges 15:1)

    That old charmer!

    I’m not really sure what this particular piece of casting might say about today’s society. I’m probably reading far too much into it.

    Oh well, I guess Samson is a cupcake compared to someone like Joshua. After all, Samson didn’t carry out any systematic acts of genocide. Apart from on the local fox population, of course, who were probably all evil foxes anyway, and thus deserving of their fiery judgement.

    • Elle Carter

      Thank you! I mentioned that casting a Black man as Samson further reinforced the Black Brute stereotype and I was told that I was “reading too far into it”. At least I’m not the only one who questioned this.

  • Erictt

    Ha! That’s spot on, Zack. But I think the race of the minor characters matters, too. At least in one scene I saw last night: Abram’s three angelic guests. When they go about their mission to Sodom to paint targets for God’s divine drone strikes, we see an African American male and an Asian male who are clearly the minions of a white male, who is none other than a soft-focus Jesus as the eternal Lord. I’m beginning to wonder if it is best to see the movie reflecting the ideology of a “post-racial” society. We’re all multiculturalists now–as long as white guys remain the heroes.

  • Randy

    Hmm.. Me thinks ya’ll read too much into what the producers are thinking about race. To be honest the whole first 2 hours of the Bible series should be offensive to any one who has read the Bible.