The Chosen: How a Crowdfunded TV Series About Jesus Took Over the World
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Chosen is the first multi-season television series about the life of Jesus Christ, and it has become one of the most successful faith-based projects in entertainment history. What began as a small, crowdfunded Christmas special has grown into a global phenomenon with hundreds of millions of views worldwide.
Here to tell the story behind the series is Katherine Warnock, Vice President of Original Content, who explains how creator Dallas Jenkins and his team built a community-driven model that bypassed traditional Hollywood gatekeepers. This is the story of how The Chosen reshaped faith content, streaming television, and how studios now think about audience, community, and belief.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:17.0 | And we're back with our American stories. |
| 0:20.5 | The Chosen is an historical television series completely adapted from the Bible. Staying true to the details of the text in the New Testament, the show follows the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ. Dallas Jenkins, creator, director, and co-writer of The Chosen came up with the concept of the series |
| 0:37.7 | once he realized there had never been a multi-season show based on the life of Jesus. |
| 0:43.9 | Today, The Chosen has over 110 million unique viewers and is a truly global phenomenon. |
| 0:51.0 | Joining us with a little more on the show and faith content in Hollywood is the |
| 0:55.7 | Chosen's vice president of original content, Catherine Hornock. Faith content for the longest |
| 1:03.1 | time was just a niche market. It was a subset, if you will, of content creation. It was never a core |
| 1:09.3 | fundamental tent pole within the Hollywood system, |
| 1:13.0 | and now it's becoming truly viable within the system. The funny thing is, I'm a high school |
| 1:18.9 | teacher who God interrupted my life and said, no, I want you to go work in Hollywood. And I had |
| 1:25.4 | to remind him, I've had no training. I don't know anything |
| 1:27.6 | about Hollywood. And he just promised that the multiplication of the talents are real if we're |
| 1:33.0 | just faithful. And boy, has he kept his word. And so for the last 20 years, I have climbed |
| 1:39.3 | through kind of the back alleys and the back doors of Hollywood to what many might say is the top. I'm helping |
| 1:46.8 | to collaboratively steer one of the biggest brands in the world. |
| 1:54.5 | My passion has been the evolution of faith content. At MGM, I worked under Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, who I looked to as kind of |
| 2:03.3 | of my generation, the mother and father of faith content. Not only has Mark had huge success with |
| 2:09.6 | the survivor, the voice, hands made tale, he is one of the greatest producers of our time, but he also |
| 2:15.1 | loves Jesus. And he and his wife Roma Downey, |
| 2:17.8 | who she was the lead actress of Touched by an Angel, I had the privilege of working under them |
... |
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