Martin Scorsese is arguably the best living film director, an icon of the Hollywood glory days. So it may come as a surprise to see the Academy Award winner launch into streaming, and not just on any service: Fox Nation, the impressive digital operation from Fox News, where he is set to launch his new show The Saints this weekend.
Mediaite attended a screening of two episodes Thursday evening at the Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan and was struck by the production value and storytelling, which suggested a much more significant budget than what we’ve grown to expect from streaming platforms launched by news networks, which had, heretofore, felt more like a placeholder bet for linear networks instead of the place to be.
The idea of The Saints is simple yet compelling. Tell the stories of beatified legends in a hyper-realistic manner that aims to separate mythology from the real-life events that led to their canonization.
Hosted, narrated, and executive produced by Scorsese, the exclusive docudrama “explores the remarkable stories of eight men and women who risked everything to embody humanity’s most noble and complex trait—faith. Premiering in two parts, the first four episodes will air weekly, beginning on Sunday, with the final four running from April to May 2025, spanning the Holy season,” according to a Fox press release.
With each episode focusing on one saint, including Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Sebastian, Maximilian Kolbe, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene and Moses the Black, Scorsese journeys over 2,000 years of history focusing on these extraordinary figures and their extreme acts of kindness, selflessness, and sacrifice.
This series works for both Mass-attending viewers and secular lovers of historical fiction and threads a pretty tight needle of telling religious-text stories without feeling preachy. This is helped significantly by the sometimes on-camera narration provided by Scorsese, who, in a post-screening chat, revealed that he grew up at St. Patricks Cathedral on Mulberry Street at a time when the Nolita neighborhood he was raised wasn’t home to hipster places like Cafe Gitane, but a rough and tumble neighborhood abutting Bowery.
Scorsese tells the stories with necessary respect to the traditional narrative but with a knowing, almost post-psychological understanding. Was Joan of Arc truly hearing voices from angels? Or was she just schizophrenic? Honestly, the way the story is told doesn’t really matter because this teenage girl opted to sacrifice her life to make a larger point about faith in the 1400s at the culmination of the 100 Years War.
Maximillian Kolbe was a Catholic Priest in Poland who created newsletters and the first Catholic radio station before he was sent to Auschwitz. The series did not ignore the ugly history that Kolbe spread anti-Semitic propaganda straight from the Elders of Zion, which makes his own sacrifice with his Jewish brothers at that harrowing concentration camp even more significant — a scene from which you can watch above.
The series raises the bar for what consumers will come to expect on a cable news-affiliated streaming platform. This isn’t quite the stuff of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and Amazon Prime and Netflix have much more significant budgets to pull off higher risk-reward productions. But as a long-time cynic of cable news streaming platforms? I was more than impressed and can easily see this as the sort of loss leader product that will drive more subscriptions to Fox Nation.
You can chalk that up to the foresight of Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who was way ahead of the streaming trend when Fox Nation was launched six years ago, well before any competitors had the twinkle in their eye that such a platform could exist, let alone thrive.
With the high-ticket The Saints from an accomplished auteur like Martin Scorsese, Fox Nation is lapping the field.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
