Forget everything about “the Camelot you know”. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is about to tell you “the origin story of the legend itself”. The right-wing news-and-views outlet now has its own streaming service. Previous fictional efforts include a Western film starring the once-cancelled Mandalorian actress Gina Carano (Terror on the Prairie) and a White Chicks-esque comedy about men who infiltrate women’s basketball (Lady Ballers). The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, which comes out this month, is its first step into scripted television.
Shapiro and his Daily Wire cofounder, the unfortunately-named ex-Hollywood producer Jeremy Boreing, seem to think the series will be big. There’s already a Pendragon Cycle board game available for preorder on the Daily Wire shop, alongside a range of Ben Shapiro-branded candles, a Jordan Peterson-branded lobster-patterned tie, and a $99.99 gold flask emblazoned with the words LEFTIST TEARS. “[Pendragon] is, without question, the largest and most ambitious production ever undertaken by a conservative new media company,” Boreing announced. “It is also the most masculine, muscular work of Christian art since Braveheart.”
By “masculine” and “muscular,” Boreing appears to mean “like Game of Thrones“. Celts hang around in the fog saying things like “You’ve let him destroy the virtue of our weir;” the father of Merlin enters into dream sequences where he sees strange horned creatures. The TV show is an adaptation of a fantasy series by Christian author Stephen R Lawhead. Its first instalment came out in 1987; Boreing has been an enthusiast since childhood. “It rejected the shallow, ‘nice’ Christianity of my youth,” he said on X, “and revealed a kind of Christian whose faith was forged in blood and sacrifice – a world where the battle for king and country was inseparable from the battle for Christ and His Kingdom.”
It is no surprise that the Daily Wire is sinking its money into this. American conservative commentators appear increasingly obsessed with what is alternately termed Judeo-Christian and Western civilisation. There’s a pure thread connecting the Druids to the Hebrews to the Romans; it bypasses the Silk Road and winds up in Washington DC, where Mr. Smith gazes in reverence at a towering Lincoln. Ben Shapiro has moved on from the days of Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings; his new book places him in Ostia in “the quiet of the burgeoning evening”, discussing “Aristotle and Augustine and Maimonides and Kant” with civilisational expert Jordan Peterson.
“These are the ideas that formed the civilisation that brought us everything from private property to the moon landing, everything from democracy to modern medicine,” he says. “These are ideas with meaning… we all feel the weight of Western civilization. Rome and Greece and Jerusalem and London and Washington; Tours and Lepanto and Vienna; the profane and the holy, the violence and the peace, the bank and the cathedral – you can feel them all. Mostly what you feel is the ghosts. The ghosts of the Lions. And they stir.” After years of lowest-common-denominator discourse, of cringe compilations and pundits locked into battle with university students, this new bit of rhetoric feels like a last-chance claim to intelligence and taste. But it comes with tremendous persuasive power. If your views are the civilisational ones, you can freely accuse wayward politicians of “destroying civilisation”; you can adjust your vision of civilisation for additional leverage, with Judaism in or out depending on who you ask, and Japan sometimes added as a bonus.
The concept feels slightly off in humble, self-deprecating Britain. But among these circles, the country has become a fetish of its own. Conservatives see it as a cautionary tale, a once-great empire fallen to the ravages of deindustrialisation, immigration, and decolonisation. Elon Musk keeps posting about grooming gangs and government censorship; his fans plot about the necessity of a “regime change war”.
“Britain has never been a country to accept defeat,” wrote an X user called Angantýr. “Ælfred fought from the marshes, Harold fought beaten and exhausted, Henry fought outnumbered and out-positioned, Churchill fought against all odds… End Britain in nuclear fire, in blazing glory. Anything that fits the stories of old when we were fought tooth and nail to defeat.”
To descend into Boreing’s Pendragon is to see British history the way Shapiro and Peterson first thunk it. It’s a visually lavish show with almost no visual imagination. It’s all about assimilating the ready-made, pseudo-pagan aesthetics of fantasy into the fantasy of civilisation: bearded men declaiming to Enya-esque music, and mists descending over green mountains, and white-cloaked women standing in front of candles, and Celts raising twigs to thundering skies. The city of Atlantis is sort of like Minoan Crete if it were occupied by priestly blondes, with sacred bulls and dolphin motifs; its language sits at the sibilant crossroads of Welsh, Hebrew and Latin. Ynys Avallach, or Avalon, contains a CGI-ed castle with a suspicious resemblance to Hogwarts; the women all look like Daenerys Targaryen. Subtitles flash onto the screen in an ancient font. “There’s more to Arthur than his birth,” goes the very first voiceover. “To understand him, you have to understand the land. This land, the island of the mighty.”
With new backers comes a new thespian cabal, who concentrate on religious programming. If you’re into this kind of thing you’re likely to see faces repeating whenever you switch on the TV, the way fans of Orson Welles or RW Fassbinder end up getting too familiar with five or six people who happened to be in the right repertory company at the right time. Merlin comes to us as part of a worldwide casting call; our female lead is Rose Reid, an up-and-comer whose filmography is almost exclusively Christian. She also stars in the romance film Surprised By Oxford, playing an American exchange student who learns to embrace religion, and The Shift, a science-fiction outing set in a regime where prayer is banned. In Pendragon, her character has flashbacks to her days in a pseudo-Coliseum in Minoan Atlantis, where she vaults over bulls in an ancient two-piece bikini. The camera zooms into her nether zone. Conservative commentator Brett Cooper will pop up later in the series; there are already clips of her in armour, doing an accent that could be either Irish or Jamaican.
Pendragon meets its audience in the middle: a pseudo-highbrow obsession with Western Christianity melds into a culture war that’s been going since the days of Gamergate. Here the word “culture” has its limits, referring almost exclusively to comic books, video games, and nostalgic reboots of films for children. “War” means an endless, bitter process of substitution, of switching race and sex and subtext back and forth with no regard for quality. This series is for the men who’ve spent years fighting for their right to the medieval times, or a special version of the medieval times with added panty shots. They’ve railed against race-swapped historical fiction and sex-swapped nostalgia reboots; they hate it when the women in their video games have too many clothes on.With Pendragon, their wishes are fulfilled; here is a perfectly average television show with several strong male characters, Olympic-beach-volleyball levels of nudity, and no black people.
“A medieval european show with medieval european looking actors?” wrote the top commenter on Gamergate subreddit KotakuInAction. “I thought that wasn’t possible anymore. I’m sold.”
[Further reading: Stop over-intellectualising pop]
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