Tag: the bible series and samson

Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s miniseries “The Bible” on the History Channel sparked some deserved head scratching on this site and elsewhere as to how many liberties with a source text are OK in a dramatization. This is serious enough when it comes to secular history (recall the Connecticut Senator who bristled at how his state’s delegation was incorrectly depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”) but takes on added gravitas when the source text is held by millions to be holy writ.

The issue becomes more interesting if a dramatist’s liberties with the text err on the side of rationalization: leaving things out which if included might cause viewers to see the story in a very different way.