Comedy
Ted Lasso
Apple TV brings ‘Ted Lasso’ back for a fourth season—this time with Ted heading up Richmond’s new women’s team instead.
Jesus and His followers knew plenty about the perils of the wilderness. From scorching deserts and stormy seas to wild passes through the mountains, they experienced their fair share of trials.
The characters who play them on The Chosen have, in comparison, a relatively easy go of it. Oh, to be sure, filming in Texas and Utah can get uncomfortable—especially when wearing heavy, itchy tunics in 95-degree heat. But presumably, none of The Chosen’s actors worry about dying while the camera is on.
Well, not until now, at any rate.
I am sure that everything done for the The Chosen in the Wild With Bear Grylls was absolutely, completely safe. Mostly.
But it doesn’t look it, and I bet it didn’t feel it.
“I thought I was going to die!” said Luke Dimyan (who plays Judas in the series) after parachuting 10,000 feet over Utah. It’s a thought that probably popped into most of the series’ six novice participants as they rappelled down cliffs, crossed chasms and occasionally ate tarantulas. (Always cook tarantulas, Grylls warns, otherwise the hair on the spider’s legs will lodge in your throat.)
The six-episode show features five of The Chosen’s most prominent actors: Dimyan, Elizabeth Tabish (Mary Magdalene), Noah James (Andrew), Paras Patel (Matthew) and Jonathan Roumie (Jesus). Grylls also takes Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins on an adventure. And while I’m sure that these day-long outings weren’t all that comfortable to do, they’re pretty fun—and sometimes revealing—to watch.
For Grylls, outdoor adventures such as these have a deeper purpose than just making folks drink water from their own socks (which does indeed happen here). To pit yourself against the perils of nature “challenges us and reveals who we are,” he says in one episode.
And so it does.
We’re used to seeing actors act. But here, viewers see the real people behind the characters they play.
Dimyan, who plays one of the most reviled people in history, seems like an incredibly nice, funny guy—one who feels wildly out of place in this beautiful wilderness. “My survival skills?” he rhetorically asks the camera. “How to describe them? I have none. None at all.” And while Dimyan knows he’s part of a show and, as such, is still putting on a performance, you can see the real trepidation in his face at times. When Grylls offers him a scorpion to eat, Dimyan gamefully puts it in his mouth and starts chewing.
“It’s not so bad,” Grylls suggests.
“No,” Dimyan says, “just incredibly horrible.”
Tabish is perhaps even more nervous about the prospect of spending a day with Bear Grylls and his host of challenges. “I think I’m straight-up scared,” she says before she even meets the guy.
But as she prepares to ride a sort of zipline across a chasm with a 400-foot drop (admitting that she’s “going to cry”), something happens as she takes her first step off the ledge. She gasps, then laughs and exults in the experience. “I loved it so much!” she says after making it safely across.
“There is this sense of, if God has us, what can hurt us?” she later says of the experience. “And worst-case scenario: If I fall to my death, what a wonderful life it was. With God, anything is possible.”
And that is perhaps where the show is at its most powerful: allowing these actors to talk about their faith and how their experiences with The Chosen have impacted their understanding of God. Grylls, a professing (if controversial) Christian, is eager to talk about faith with his guests, and the conversations can be revealing and sometimes moving.
Tabish, for instance, tearfully talks about the personal struggles she faced before trying out for Lilith/Mary Magdalene (which she also talked about in an episode of The Plugged In Show). “I don’t think I would’ve been able to play this character if I hadn’t gone through certain things that helped me understand her. … If I didn’t go through that valley.”
“The summits in our lives are great,” Grylls tells her. “But really, it’s the valleys that build us.”
And all that’s great. But the show comes with a few content valleys to be aware of, too.
This is a survival show, and “survival” sometimes requires people to be less, um, decorous. Participants eat bugs, drink from their own dirty socks (Grylls mentions that sometimes it’s a choice between that or your own underwear) and urinate in MRE pouches. (The liquid helps heat the food sealed safely inside.) We’ll hear an occasional murmured profanity. And, of course, we witness peril aplenty.
And remember, we’re dealing with real people talking about their own real sense of faith, too. Viewers might not agree with every theological or religious statement they hear.
But on balance, The Chosen in the Wild With Bear Grylls is the right sort of adventure—one that indeed challenges its participants and encourages them to share parts of their real selves with us. And it teaches a strong lesson, too: Be brave, be bold and be smart. God created us to do more than just stare at a screen.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Luke Dimyan joins Grylls for a day-long adventure in Castle Valley, Utah. “Usually when I get weird invitations to meet someone in the middle of the desert, normally I don’t say yes,” Dimyan quips. But this time he did, and his first challenge is jumping out of a helicopter (via a tandem parachute) to the canyon trail below. After that comes a nearly 5-mile hike through the desert with a chasm-spanning line or two thrown into the mix.
We learn that Dimyan is of Coptic Egyptian heritage, and his grandfather was a cleric in Coptic Christianity. He says that he was drawn to the role of Judas because of the challenge of it. And when Grylls asks what Dimyan thinks drew people to Jesus, Dimyan says, “I think it was His acceptance. He saw people, and He allowed them to be the best versions of themselves.”
Dimyan is asked to urinate in an MRE pouch—a task that he struggles with. (We don’t see Dimyan actually pee, but we hear a lot about it and watch as he struggles to do so.) “No one’s looking,” Grylls says, even as a camera focuses on Dimyan’s back. Later, when they open the food portion of the MRE (untouched by urine), Grylls jokes that the brown substance “looks a bit like the other end.”
Dimyan also eats a scorpion and complains about its aftertaste. He and Grylls stuff wet sand in their respective socks and squeeze the water out, letting it drain into their mouths. He appears to mutter the word “d–n.”
Grylls takes Elizabeth Tabish through the canyonlands near Moab, Utah. On the way to the rendezvous point, Tabish admits that she’s pretty nervous. “I don’t really know what we’re doing today. I don’t even really like to drive,” as she steers her Jeep down the road. And she admits that she’s worried about throwing her neck out—a common occurrence for her after two previous car accidents threw her spine out of whack. But she quickly warms up to Grylls’ challenges, which include walking across a makeshift ladder suspended across a chasm, riding a zipline across another, eating a tarantula (“an acquired taste,” she quips) and sipping from a puddle of water through a survival straw filter.
“I usually do not drink water that is sitting in a pool in the desert,” she says. But she adds that “it tastes like water. A little spicy, but …” allowing the thought to trail off.
She also talks openly about her faith. “I’ve tried to be skeptical for a lot of my life,” she says, “and the truth just keeps showing up. [God] is real. His love is real.” She unpacks her darkest professional times before she auditioned for The Chosen, revealing that she was numbing chronic pain through alcohol and that there were “a lot of days that I couldn’t get out of bed.”
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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