• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 8 hours ago

Fox’s upcoming three-part, Bible-based miniseries, “The Faithful: Women of the Bible,” got an Easter-season airdate this week, as its first promo spot made a high-profile debut during Sunday’s NFC Championship game.

The airdate announcement and the promo spot represent the start of a promotion push for the series, which was first announced at last spring’s Fox Upfront in New York.

Billed as “a three-week event,” the six-hour series will air in three two-hour segments starting Sunday, March 22, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern, continuing the following Sunday, March 29, Palm Sunday and concluding on Easter evening, Sunday, April 5. 

The schedule means that Fox’s long-time “animation domination” lineup of animated series will be preempted for three consecutive weeks.

In “The Faithful,” the stories are told of five women from the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis. 

The five include Sarah, wife of Abraham (Minnie Driver, above photo), and Hagar (Natacha Karam), Sarah’s servant, who gave birth to Ishmael. He is considered to be one of the patriarchs of Islam.

The father of Ishmael was Abraham stemming from an arrangement by which Hagar would serve as a sort of surrogate for Sarah, who was infertile.

The other “Women of the Bible” featured in the show are: Rebekah (Alexa Davalos), wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob and Esau, and Rebekah’s nieces, sisters Leah (Millie Brady) and Rachel (Blu Hunt).

Leah was the first wife of Jacob and mother of six sons -- including Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah. Rachel was Jacob’s second wife and mother of Joseph and Benjamin.

Filmed in Italy, “The Faithful” is “a faithful dramatization of the Book of Genesis as told through the eyes of the courageous and passionate yet flawed women whose descendants would shape the future of faith as we know it today,” said a Fox press release on Monday.

The show traces the lives of these matriarchs and the roles their sons and ancestors played in the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Fox says the series is timed for both the Easter and Passover holidays, which coincide this year.

The eight-day celebration of Passover starts on Wednesday, April 1, which is the fourth day of the Easter Holy Week.

In some respects, devoting six hours of Sunday prime time to a religion-based miniseries is a daring move. Such content is relatively rare on network TV.

Some were short-lived. In 2015, “A.D. The Bible Continues,” a scripted biblical drama produced by reality-TV king Mark Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey (“Touched By an Angel”), was canceled after one 12-episode season on NBC.

Another drama series based in the era of the Old Testament, ABC’s “Of Kings and Prophets,” was yanked after two episodes in 2016.

By contrast, an historical dramatization of the life of Jesus -- “The Chosen” -- was being billed as a “global phenomenon” before The CW picked up all three seasons, a total of 26 episodes, in 2023.

The network aired the series on Sunday nights for 26 weeks starting in July 2023 until its finale on Christmas Eve.