Testament: a slow start
Maddy Fry• June 19, 2025
Once upon a time, shows with an obviously Biblical message had one thing in their favour – almost no-one watched them. This meant that the pressure to live up to high standards or chase ratings was minimal. That changed with The Chosen, a sleeper hit that gained traction five seasons in. It was surprising that such an overtly religious show, one that made the life of Jesus its central theme, found such a large audience – yet it pushed the bar higher for any successors in the genre.
Testament, a series based on the Acts of the Apostles and starting at Pentecost, is the most recent brainchild of Angel Studios, the Utah-based creator of Christian TV and films which gave us The Chosen. Set in the present day, the pilot shows us a highly militarised society (ironically called “Salem”, or “peace”) trying to clamp down on the resurgent Jesus movement, a sect the authorities hoped would perish with its crucified leader. When rumours swirl of a man risen from the dead, families are turned against each other; sons and daughters swell the movement’s ranks against the wishes of their elders, who want to see this latest heretic stay dead. The authorities (known as the Imperium) are not pleased. There will be blood, and it’ll come from the innocent more than the guilty.
Herein lies the show’s main flaw. Changing some names from the Biblical narrative and wearing the coat of a secular dystopia – the jackboots and dark suits have echoes of The Last of Us and The Handmaid’s Tale – makes it easy for the viewer to feel a sense of distance from the story’s New Testament roots under the heel of the Roman Empire. Even though the allegory is obvious, the Imperium feels groundless, appearing in a vacuum without any guiding ideology.
Some aspects are genuinely chilling to watch given the recent uprisings in LA, but for the most part the terror experienced by the regime’s subjects never truly feels convincing. This is possibly because the Jesus movement’s Jewish origins are played down. In an atmosphere of heightened antisemitism, this feels like a missed opportunity.
The acting and storytelling are better than you might think for a production where the message could easily override the quality; yet the performances are not quite nuanced enough to convey how deranged people must have seemed for following this new messiah. The actor playing Esther, the mother of Stephen (the Jesus cult’s most fervent young convert), doesn’t quite have the emotional range needed for such a layered part. When she urges her son not just to turn away from heresy, but from false hope – “I’ve seen movements like this come and go” – we sense the real emotional core of the story lies here. The fear that there will be no end to a community’s persecution is a horrifyingly prescient one, but it’s only dealt with superficially.
In a similar vein, our hero Stephen is supposed to be highly intelligent, but we never see the evidence. We see naivety and fecklessness, but rarely get a glimpse of the intellect his mother values so highly and feels he is squandering. It’s less of an acting failure and more a casualty of the clunky dialogue, which relies too heavily on exposition, which in turn undermines one of the episode’s strongest elements – the prominent role of women’s testimonies among the early Christians.
The ability for women to be heard makes a pleasing contrast with how much their voices are marginalised in the Imperium, but the effect is ruined when one lacky directly tells Esther, “You have no voice.” It would be so much more powerful to strip it back and show the audience this through gestures and subtext, rather than beat us round the head.
Some of the best performances come from the minor characters. Caleb, a disabled homeless man who is told to get up and walk (based on the lame beggar healed by the apostle Peter), gives the most restrained performance of all, showing us someone whose sense of humanity has been snuffed out by a thousand cuts. When he regains the use of his legs, we get the first real sense of how much appeal there was in a movement that promised to make broken things whole, and why 2000 years later, still does. The shock on the faces of onlookers when their scepticism is smothered is genuinely moving, and makes the accusation of heresy seconds later all the more devastating. No doubt things will get worse before they get better. And no-one has caught a glimpse yet of the man at the centre.
The makers of Testament have set themselves a hard task. Having been released on a platform designed for people who have already drunk the Kool-Aid, the show is unlikely to have much appeal beyond its core audience. Yet the illogical name changes and imagery drawn from more high-profile dramas seem designed to attract a less biblically literate audience. That, and the fact that it’s being advertised to commuters on the tube.
It makes for a muddled start, albeit with a few small signs of promise. Much like the community it depicts, we can only hope for a resurrection.