‘The Faithful: Women of the Bible’ Review: Minnie Driver in Fox Drama

I suppose one can’t complain too much about a show’s overreliance on deus ex machina plot developments when seeing God’s fingerprints all over every revelation or twist is literally the entire point. Still, it’s difficult not to wish Fox’s The Faithful: Women of the Bible offered something more substantive to hang on to than the sense that everything we’re seeing is being guided by the hands of higher powers — God’s, but also history’s, and creator René Echevarria’s.

Ostensibly an effort to recenter the female perspective in some of the most famous tales from the Book of Genesis, the three-part event miniseries instead treats its characters like paper dolls to be pushed around at the whims of a narrative set in stone millennia ago. In the end, it offers little actual insight into these women, the men around them or even the deity who’s willed all of their fates into being.

The first and only installment sent to critics recounts the tale of Sarai (Minnie Driver) and Abram (Jeffrey Donovan) — or Sarah and Abraham, as they’re eventually and more popularly known. (Future installments will center on Sarah’s daughter-in-law Rebekah, to be played by Alexa Davalos, and Rebekah’s daughter-in-laws Leah and Rachel, to be played by Millie Brady and Blu Hunt.) In theory, their story ought to have enough drama to satisfy both pious and secular tastes.

Decades into the marriage, Sarai and Abram remain blissfully in love; the one note of regret between them is an inability to conceive. Then one day, God speaks directly to Abram. God commands Abram to leave his native land in search of a new one. God also tells Abram he’ll be the father of many children. Abram may not know how or why any of this is happening, but he feels in his bones that he must do as God says. With barely a moment’s notice, he orders his entire household to pack up and strike out for parts unknown.

This is, or should be, exciting stuff: the unexplainable but absolute certainty of Abram, the bafflement with which it’s received by Sarai, the rippling consequences it has on the community he leads. Instead, The Faithful allows her only a minute of confusion (“God? What God?”) before she resolves to stand by her man. The speed and ease of her decision make sense only within the context of the fact that we already know this is what has to happen, because it’s what’s happened in this story every time it’s been told by millions and millions of people across centuries and centuries.

The rest of the 84-minute (two hours with commercials) double episode, directed by Danny Cannon, follows thusly. Every scene plays out as the most generic version of itself — unfolding along preset story beats and against plain desert backdrops rather than growing organically from specific individuals in a specific setting. Every character is painted with a brush so broad as to render them almost featureless. (Around here, “likes the color blue” counts as a distinguishing characteristic.)

Should anyone ever find themselves in a real jam, like imprisonment by a vengeful pharaoh or life-threatening thirst, God pops by long enough to get the story back on track. As for why God needs certain outcomes to play out the way they do, The Faithful does not pretend to know. He just does.

There are enough flashes of potential to suggest it didn’t have to be this way. Sarai’s marriage to Abram might be too one-dimensionally sweet to be interesting, and Abram himself too passive (well, aside from the whole “we have to move” thing) to give much thought. But Sarai has a far thornier relationship with Hagar (Natacha Karam), the Egyptian handmaid she persuades, in a B.C. version of surrogacy, to conceive with Abram so that Sarai can raise the baby as her own.

Over years and then decades, the two women’s relationship swings between fierce sisterhood, bitter jealousy and an uneasy combination of the two. At the same time, Sarai finds herself in a poignant bind — she places complete faith in her husband but not necessarily in the God that her husband, in turn, has placed all of his faith in.

These are all fascinating mixed emotions to play, and Driver does a capable job of layering them on her face whenever she’s called to. But she’s not called to nearly often enough. While The Faithful makes some effort to humanize these characters, it’s ultimately more interested in lionizing them as heroines. Rather than follow these feelings into darker or harder places, then, it keeps them at arm’s length, acknowledging them only glancingly before moving on to the next big twist or time jump.

This straightforwardly noble approach surely has some uses. One can imagine The Faithful playing fine in Bible study classes, or as unobjectionably religious-but-not-too content around which to gather with the family over holidays. (Indeed, its final episode is timed to land Easter Sunday.) It’s harder to envision it capturing the attention of a channel-surfer just looking for something interesting to watch. For all its divine ambition, the series falls victim to the same old pitfalls that have sunk biopics of so many lesser mortals. It places too much faith in the inherent draw of its subjects, and not enough in the power of back-to-basics storytelling.