For years, television series have beat audiences over the head with progressive messaging. Many attempts to counter-produce alternatives with traditional and faith-centered themes either died before production or failed to break through.
But that trend hasn’t reached Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing’s fantasy series “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin” — an explicitly Christian adaptation of Stephen R. Lawhead’s novels about the origins of Merlin and early Arthurian legends.
The series debuted on DailyWire+ in January and later became the No. 1 fantasy series in the U.K., Ireland, Spain, and Portugal after hitting Prime Video overseas; it arrived on Prime in the U.S. on September 1 and has continued to climb.
Now Boreing joins Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman, co-hosts of “Rufo and Lomez,” to discuss why conservatives keep underperforming in entertainment — and how “Pendragon” successfully broke the pattern.
“You’ve managed to do the impossible,” Keeperman tells Boreing, “which is make something that looks great, it’s slick, it’s professional, it’s well acted, it’s well written, it looks like a high production TV show ought to look, and you’ve done it within the conservative ecosystem.”
“And moreover, it’s a show that’s not about politics, per se. It’s just good storytelling,” he adds.
He inquires about how Boreing was able to “pull this rabbit out the hat.”
“The hard way, of course,” Boreing quips.
“Art is very ambitious, and a show like ‘The Pendragon Cycle’ requires an awful lot of risk to be taken by an awful lot of people,” he continues, highlighting the Daily Wire, executive producer Dallas Sonnier, and “the cast and crew” as the primary risk-takers who saw the lofty project from idea to reality.
As for the actors, Boreing praises them as “the greatest ensemble of relatively unknown actors maybe ever assembled.”
“I’m so proud of this cast,” he adds, “but it’s a risk for them to associate with what they feared would be a really political operation. Of course, it didn’t turn out to be because that wasn’t what we were chasing. We were chasing true entertainment and true art.”
Entertainment, Boreing notes, is an area conservatives tend to underachieve.
“We think that the audience will only accept a polemic, but that isn’t true,” he says. “Our audience engages with entertainment and art just as much as any other audience.”
The problem, he says, is that conservative audiences haven’t “had any instruction” on what “good art with [conservative] values” looks like because it’s “so rare.”
“What we’re left with is what I call the ‘want to want to’s’ … movies that nobody actually wants to see, but … they want to support it,” Boreing explains, noting that these conservatives usually end up “[watching] the exact same television as everyone else” despite progressive themes and values.
This is deeply problematic, he argues, because as “Will and Grace” demonstrated with public attitudes toward homosexuality in the late 1990s and early 2000s, television can “actually [change] how an entire generation” views political issues.
“That’s the power of actual entertainment,” says Boreing. “[‘Will and Grace’] did that not leading with its politics; it did it by completely immersing an audience into the lives of a set of characters who had a particular point of view, and it drew you into that point of view, and we tried to do the same with ‘Pendragon.’”
To hear more about the series, watch the episode above.
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