My best friend asked me to watch The Chosen with her about 6 weeks ago.
As someone who's taken a very long time to come around, perhaps my opinion doesn't count for much, but for me at least, the show has facilitated a deepening of my faith, despite some of its failings as others have pointed out. It did prompt me to read the Gospels again. I can see where the show has deviated, but the Gospels also make a lot more sense to me now, as I didn't understand the context of the times in which those events occurred and were written about.
I have mixed feelings about the show. On the one hand, it's very effective at delivering cathartic drama. The healings and miracles resonate with me in a way that they never did before, in large part because a context for the people's experiences has been provided. And the context of the times make sense to me now; seeing the Jewish traditions and the cultural tensions of Rome and Jerusalem enacted on the screen has really helped. And I appreciate its attempts to "answer" some of the "questions" I had about those times, like what sort of person Matthew might have had to have been to write down the entire Sermon on the Mount, or why Simon Peter would have described himself as being so sinful. Not to say that the depictions of the show are correct, just understandable.
Other questions, like why Thomas would have been so "doubting," seem to have been ham-fistedly put in place. Trying to come up with a plausible context for Thomas's doubt is obviously why the whole Ramah storyline was invented, but I found it unsatisfying. (I have other concerns about the Thomas storyline which I find more troubling.)
It seems to me that, as with everything in the secular world, we are provided opportunities to come closer to God or to move further away. Surely that has more to do with God's will, and the heart of the individual, than the material in question. Maybe the show prompted me to go back to the Gospels because in my heart I realized I needed to work on my relationship to Christ.
