Big studios embracing faith-based series is welcome news, but the author argues that outsourcing distribution to mainstream platforms leaves faith audiences exposed the moment tastes shift, and that the real safeguard is cheaper, message-first storytelling that does not need a studio at all.
There is a scene, reportedly, in the third season of House of David where the actor Martyn Ford, who plays Goliath, admits that his own worst enemy is himself. A fitting line, as it turns out, for the entire genre he now belongs to.
A faith-based series with real production values, streaming on Prime Video, watched by people who would never otherwise seek it out - this is good news, and I do not want to spend a single paragraph pretending otherwise. For years, Christian content lived in a kind of parallel economy: modest budgets, modest reach, modest expectations. Now a mainstream studio has decided that the story of David and Goliath, told well, can compete for attention with anything else on the platform. That is not a small thing.
But a thought comes, and it will not leave me alone: what happens the day the numbers dip.
What happens when the numbers dip
Because that is how these platforms work. A series survives on renewal, and renewal survives on ratings, shares, the churn of algorithms that do not know or care what a story means to the people watching it. House of David is there because someone in Seattle or Los Angeles ran the figures and liked what they saw. If the next quarter’s figures look different, or if the appetite for faith content simply moves on, as appetites do, the series disappears with barely a note of explanation. And here is the part that troubles me most: when it disappears from the big platform, it does not quietly resurface somewhere smaller. It just goes. The infrastructure to catch it is not there. Independent and faith-focused platforms exist, but they are, by and large, not the kind of partner that a major studio wants to be seen dealing with. The audience that remains interested, and it will remain interested, finds itself with nowhere left to watch.
A guest in someone else’s house
This is not only about big-budget streaming. The same pattern plays out in publishing, in documentary film, in Christian events that once had a natural home in mainstream coverage and now depend entirely on whether the topic is fashionable this season. Faith content, across the board, has become a guest in someone else’s house, welcome only as long as it behaves like a good tenant and pays its way in engagement metrics.
You never needed the studio
And yet - here is where I think the anxiety is only half justified - the dependency on studio money was never as necessary as it looked. A phone, held steady, pointed at someone telling the truth about their life, has produced more views on social platforms than plenty of productions with a real budget behind them. The lesson of user-generated content, whatever one thinks of the rest of it, is that audiences do not actually need elaborate production to be moved. They need a story worth hearing. The polish helps; it has never been the point.
So the sensible response to House of David is not to hope that more studios follow its example, though I would not mind if they did. The sensible response is to stop treating studio interest as the measure of whether faith content matters. A Christian media organization that spends its energy chasing the next big platform deal is betting its future on someone else’s ratings spreadsheet. A Christian media organization that invests instead in the story itself, told plainly and well, on whatever modest channel it can control, is betting on something rather more durable.
Goliath, as it happens, was also the bigger production. It did not end well for him.
Let the studios make their series, and let audiences enjoy them while they last. But the people who actually care whether this content continues to exist in five years would do well to keep their own house in order, on platforms nobody else can cancel.