-- The Bible, History Channel: This is quite an adventure covering both books of the Bible and just in time for the approach of Easter. This 10-part series started as a documentary and morphed into a drama. The Christian Science Monitor, in writing about the series producers Mark Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, opined:
Burnett and his wife have produced a mini-series that is not only "not disappointing," but actually rises to the top of the "Wow" scale. Attempting to take on the whole Bible in 10 hours is pretty much an impossible task for just about anyone, but apparently not for the Burnetts. They really have produced something of epic proportions.
-- Red Widow, ABC: This is a remake of the Dutch series Penoza. This can be good or bad, depending on the quality of the effort. In the case of The Killing, Shameless, and House of Cards it was a great success. The new show sounds like a grittier version of Showtime's Weeds. Here is the plot from ABC:
Marta Walraven seems to have an idyllic life. A stay-at-home mom in tony Marin County, just north of San Francisco, she is devoted to her three children and her husband. Behind this perfect façade, however, is a more complicated story: Evan, Marta’s husband, supports the family by exporting marijuana. Marta is familiar with the world of organized crime: her father, Andrei Petrov, and his loyal bodyguard, Luther, are Bratva – Russian gangsters – in San Francisco. It’s a world from which she and her sister Kat always wanted to escape, though they never quite did.
But when Evan is brutally murdered in their driveway, everything changes. Marta’s first concern is to protect her children – and yet when FBI Agent James Ramos promises Marta justice in exchange for her cooperation, she cannot go against the Bratva code. She refuses his help.
Slowly, the truth about her husband’s murder begins to emerge: Evan’s business partners – Marta’s scheming brother, Irwin Petrov, and their best friend, the hapless Mike Tomlin – were involved in the theft of millions of dollars of cocaine from the formidable international crime boss, Nicholae Schiller. Evan paid with his life, but as far as Schiller is concerned, his debt is not clear. It falls to Marta, as Evan’s widow, to navigate the criminal underworld in order to repay this debt – in whatever way Schiller sees fit.
Hounded by the FBI on the one hand and by Schiller on the other, while also trying to raise three grieving kids on her own, Marta discovers a tenacity she never knew she had. As she hunts for the truth about her husband’s death and struggles to keep her children safe, she’ll rely on her resourcefulness, determination and her Bratva DNA like never before. But just how far is Marta willing to go in order to beat her adversaries at their own deadly game?
I will probably watch Vikings, record The Bible, and hold off on Red Widow until some later time. Who knew Sundays could be so busy?
Update: I think I chose my viewing schedule well. Vikings turned out to be an excellent choice. While I was worried in the first few minutes when I saw Odin lifting bodies from the battlefield, the story quickly came together and the acting was fine throughout. The Bible, on the other hand, did not work at all. Seeing Ninja angels in Sodom was a little too strange. And while the show may work for the thoroughly devoted who know their bible stories backward and forward, I do not see the show bringing on any new followers. Maybe doing a documentary with some acting in the background would have been better. Finally, it seems Red Widow was off to a slow start in the ratings and may not last too long, so I am glad I did not become committed to this new show.
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