Review: ‘The Listeners' at Lyric Opera loses its story as it follows the Hum
'The Listeners,' the wild new opera with music by Missy Mazzoli and a libretto by Royce Varek, begins with a coyote dancing across the stage of Chicago's Lyric Opera and proceeds thereafter to the operatic consideration of a perpetual ringing in the ears that afflicts numerous modern-day Americans in the southwestern United States, and elsewhere.
We learn of this condition through meeting Claire, sung by soprano Nicole Heaston, a schoolteacher who has a dull hum in her ears so unyielding, disruptive and invasive that it causes her work in the classroom to fall apart. She finds solace in the discovery that one of her students, Kyle (the fine young tenor Jonas Hacker) can hear the same sound, called the Hum, that the rest of the community, including Claire's confused husband and daughter (played by Zachary Nelson and Jasmine Habersham) apparently see as some kind of mental health issue.
'How do you murder a sound?' Kyle is driven to ask, as he grabs his ears in despair.
As creepy and weird as all that sounds, and 'The Listeners,' which is based on a story by Jordan Tannahill and was first seen in the U.S. at Opera Philadelphia, is indeed creepy and weird, there's a certain aesthetic logic in an opera about an unavoidable sound. Choral passages of Mazzoli's music explore the various potential dimensions of the aforementioned Hum and its ability to drown out all of life's beautiful sonorous experiences and yet also function harmonically.
So is the Hum nihilistic? Seductive? Soporific? Dangerous? Or a kind of unifying bass note? Does it represent dissonance and discord, or does it offer a communal possibility? Mazzoli's music explores all of those questions.
Claire and Kyle, spurned by their loved ones, look for solace in the like-minded, as so many of us do. They find a group led by a patriarch named Dillon (John Moore), who has assembled a room full of people from all walks of life, unified by their ability to hear the same Hum. Their voices hum together and, in those moments, Mazzoli's music is both beautiful and disturbing.
Up to that point in 'The Listeners,' while the piece stayed grounded in the reality of place, time and ordinary suburban experience, beautifully designed in a mid-century fashion by Adam Rigg, I was entirely on board with the whole provocative endeavor. But that gets you not quite to intermission.
Dillon, it transpires, is a cult leader and, in Act 2, the opera spins off into various digressions involving low-frequency radio waves, sexual misconduct and the kinds of conspiracy theories that seem to cling to the people of the American desert. Conflict also emerges between a woman named Angela (Daniela Mack) and Claire over who gets to be Dillon's preferred subordinate. Claire's family, which is the most interesting part of the opera along with Kyle, disappears for most of Act 2 and we're left with Moore's Dillon who, in the end, is little more than a one-note cliche, even as he conducts strange video interviews with his adherents.
I don't lay that at the door of the booming baritone; it's just not a character with any nuance. One intuits his nefariousness quickly and tension, musical and otherwise, dissipates; you just wait for him to be revealed for what he claims not to be. And so it goes. Cult leaders, artistically, are easy targets.
In other words, director Lileana Blain-Cruz's production (restaged at Lyric by Mikhaela Mahony) jumps the shark, if that's an appropriate metaphor for a show preoccupied with the desert landscape. Blain-Cruz, who makes her Lyric debut, is a noted avant gardist who helmed a controversial production of 'The Skin of Our Teeth' at Lincoln Center, where she serves as resident director. I've seen some of her previous work and she's highly creative and laudably fearless, but the roots of reality, and the clarity of the storytelling, have a habit of slipping away, leaving the audience unmoored. And it seems to me that 'The Listeners' needs that anchor in reality to work.
Without it, the price paid is the loss of empathy. It's far easier for us to care about the person than the Hum itself. If only we spent more time with Claire and her husband Paul, or got to know Kyle better or Bram, an enigmatic man with a history, as beautifully sung by Christopher Filipowicz. But we're stuck with Dillon and his camera, both standard-issue villains who seem to have been covered with a coat of gray powder, befitting their black-and-white roles.
Daniela Mack, Jonas Hacker, Nicole Heaston and the company of "The Listeners" by Missy Mazzoli at Lyric Opera of Chicago. (Andrew Cioffi)
I won't spoil how the opera ends. Suffice to say that it lands as a piece about the validity of choosing your family, and as a cautionary tale about listening to your loved ones when they say, or sing, they feel something you do not understand. Those themes are the most interesting ones, for me, in 'The Listeners,' which is not without its artistry or its musical pleasures, especially when voices are raised in a fusion of despair and release.
But like Claire, the opera gets trapped and struggles to emerge.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: 'The Listeners' (2.5 stars)
When: Through April 11
Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
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Atlantic
3 hours ago
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How I Accidentally Inspired a Major Chinese Motion Picture
In December, a friend sent me the trailer for a new Chinese movie called Clash. It's a sports comedy about a ragtag group of Chinese men who start an American-football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learn to block and tackle, build camaraderie, and face off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. Funny, I thought. In 2014, I wrote an article for The New Republic about a ragtag group of Chinese men who'd started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learned to block and tackle, built camaraderie, and—yes—faced off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. The Chinese studio behind Clash, iQIYI, is not the first to take an interest in the Dockers' story. My article, titled 'Year of the Pigskin,' was natural Hollywood bait: a tale of cross-cultural teamwork featuring a fish-out-of-water American protagonist, published at a moment when Hollywood and China were in full-on courtship and the future of U.S.-China relations looked bright. It didn't take much imagination to see Ryan Reynolds or Michael B. Jordan playing the coach—a former University of Michigan tight end who'd missed his shot at a pro career because of a shoulder injury—with Chinese stars filling the supporting roles. Sony bought the option to the article, as well as the coach's life rights. When that project fizzled a few years later, Paramount scooped up the rights but never made anything. Now a Chinese studio appeared to have simply lifted the idea. I texted Chris McLaurin, the former Dockers coach who now works at a fancy law firm in London. (Since my original article published, we have become good friends.) Should we say something? Should we sue? At the very least, one of us had to see the movie. Fortunately, it was premiering in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I booked a flight to the Netherlands. The movie I saw, which came out in Chinese theaters last month, did not alleviate my concerns. But the film, along with the conversations I had with its producer and director, provided a glimpse into the cultural and political forces that led to Clash 's creation. Indeed, the trajectory of the IP itself—from the original article to the Hollywood screenplays to the final Chinese production—says a lot about how the relationship between the United States and China has evolved, or devolved, over the past decade. What began as a story about transcending cultural boundaries through sports has turned into a symbol of just how little China and the U.S. understand each other—and how little interest they have in trying. I went to China in 2011 because I had a vague sense that something important was happening there. I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. 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The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. 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Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. 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Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. 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They're both slowly building dedicated audiences and have cashed in with big hits, like the Angel Studios movie Sound of Freedom, which made $250 million on a less than $15-million budget. These companies insist they aren't partisan, seeking only to create a brand associated with family and amorphous American values that parents can feel comfortable watching at home. But GAM and like-minded companies are able to succeed where secular alternatives struggle by using a sense of conservative aggrievement with Hollywood to their benefit. Bad review in a mainstream publication? It's the liberal media, even more reason to support their offerings. Themes like same-sex marriage or pre-marital sex offend you? Try faith-based media. For decades, many of the same concepts could be applied to Hallmark or Lifetime films. While not overtly political, they espoused generally culturally conservative values and a moral tradition that appealed to conservative viewers, with an emphasis on small-town living and heterosexual love stories. But as Hallmark has begun making some content about gay couples and hasn't committed to promoting unambiguously religious themes, a swath of its fans have gone looking for something else that more directly conforms with their politics and their values. That's where many of them find GAM and a growing slate of faith-based or avowedly conservative production companies. Longtime president of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo, for example, helped to bankroll Wonder Project, the Texas-based studio that produced House of David, the wildly popular retelling of the biblical shepherd's story that found a home on Amazon's Prime Video. Leo received a $1.6-billion gift that he's using with the express purpose of making culture more conservative. 'You're only going to accomplish so much in shifting American cultural and social life through politics and public policy if you're not dealing with the cultural institutions that are at the choke point of American opinion, American sentiment, American thinking,' Leo tells POLITICO Magazine. 'So entertainment, of course, is a really important part of trying to rebalance the culture.' GAM leaders don't state their ambitions as quite as directly political. But they also believe there's money and cultural influence in serving people who are tired of what they're getting from Hollywood. 'We're focused on meeting the needs of an unmet audience,' Abbott wrote in an email to POLITICO Magazine. 'Our viewers are multigenerational and value content that reflects faith, family, and country.' Abbott, a spry, 63-year-old Long Islander by birth, has been working in family entertainment since 1988. He worked at big networks like CBS and Fox before he joined the Crown Media Family Networks in 2000 and was named CEO of Crown Media — the parent company that operates Hallmark programming — in 2009. He oversaw the launch of the Hallmark Movie Channel, got Hallmark into the scripted series game, and presided over decades of sustained success for the brand. Everything looked rosy before a tumultuous breakup during President Donald Trump's first term spurred by a White House Christmas event, an ad for a wedding registry website and a public outcry. 'In 2017, you could see the change in the chairman and the management at the parent company and the family to become much more woke,' Abbott said in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when asked why he left Hallmark. 'And DEI driven, very DEI driven. They were in DEI before it was cool to be in DEI.' According to Abbott, in 2017 the Trump White House chose Hallmark to host a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. After the network hosted the show, he says he was told by his bosses at the Hallmark Channel's parent company, that 'you're either for humanity or you're against it,' chastising him for agreeing to host the event. Hallmark did not respond to requests for comment. Then, in 2020, Abbott departed the company after a December 2019 ad for wedding website that depicted a same-sex couple exchanging vows and kissing. After the conservative group One Million Moms objected to the ad, Abbott and his team pulled the ad from its programming — a move that prompted swift backlash. #BoycottHallmark trended on X, then Twitter, and public figures including Ellen DeGeneres called out Abbott directly. The company ultimately reversed course and reinstated the ad, and Abbott stepped down a little over a month after the fallout and the intense backlash to pulling the ad inside and outside the company. 'We made a decision to not take one commercial and that blew up everything on the planet,' Abbott said in April on the podcast of Moms for America, an organization that recently presented Trump with the 'Man of the Century' award at a gala held at Mar-a-Lago. He noted Hallmark was careful about the ads they took in general, not running ads for political campaigns, alcohol or drugs or feminine hygiene products. In his email, Abbott wrote, 'I am very proud of what we built at Hallmark, but their priority became creating content to align with political and social counterculture rather than staying focused on celebrating tradition and delivering what viewers wanted. My goal has always been to serve the audience with uplifting entertainment that creates trust.' So Abbott pivoted into the world of faith-based media. As Abbott tells it, actor Jon Voight — now Trump's Special Ambassador to Hollywood, who starred in the Hallmark film J.L. Family Ranch in 2016 — introduced Abbott to Tom Hicks, a Texas-based private equity investor who runs Hicks Equity Partners. In 2020, Hicks Equity Partners looked to raise $200 million for conservative alternatives to Fox News and explored buying Newsmax, as they sought to put their political imprimatur on American media. (Hicks' son, Thomas Hicks Jr., is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a national finance co-chair for Trump's 2016 campaign.) The Newsmax acquisition never came to fruition, but Hicks Equity Partners helped Abbott get Great American Media off the ground, aiding in his acquisition of the cable network Great American Country in 2021 from Discovery which was subsequently rebranded to Great American Family. Their original programming airs on both linear cable and streaming. According to Great American Media, Hicks Equity Partners has been joined in their initial investment by several other sources, including Deason Capital (a Dallas-based family office run by conservative activist and donor Doug Deason) and Sony. Hicks Equity Partners did not respond to a request for comment. 'Right now, we're going through a period where religious conservatives are increasingly assertive and very energetic in funding and expanding their own cultural space,' said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. While it rejects an explicitly political label, Great American Media receives much of its funding from sources that also fund politically conservative organizations and candidates. They and other similar production companies believe they can power their growth through servicing a large swath of viewers who sound a lot like how Republican candidates describe their voters. 'We have people in our culture who very much want all aspects of their life to be consistent with family-centered values,' Leo says. 'When they're in the marketplace, or when they're in the political world, or when they're simply doing what people do in life to engage in leisure and entertainment, they look for that kind of family-values centered thinking and approach to life.' In the world of faith-based television and movie content, business is booming. Sound of Freedom, a 2023 thriller distributed by the faith-based network Angel Studios about child trafficking that critics called a vehicle for promoting conspiracy theories, minted over $184 million in North America. That made it one of the most successful independent movies ever. His Only Son, another 2023 Angel Studios film, made over $13 million on a $250,000 budget. The Chosen, an ongoing television series about Jesus by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, claims to have crowdfunded almost $100 million and reached a quarter of a billion people via streaming. Crowdfunding is a popular tool for faith-based production companies that use their audience's enthusiasm — often around a particular political point — to raise cash. Since 2022, The Daily Wire, a conservative media company co-founded by commentator Ben Shapiro, has also produced multiple successful television shows and films and has become a big player in this space. House of David was a huge crossover hit for Wonder Studios, and a starting point for Leo's mission to get more traditional studios and streaming platforms to promote these types of stories. 'I don't see this as being in competition with big Hollywood. I see this as being an opportunity for big Hollywood to make targeted investments that make them money at a time when it's hard to make money in producing movies,' says Leo. Great American Family, meanwhile, grew its viewership by 20 percent between the fourth quarters of 2023 and 2024, making it one of the few networks achieving that sort of rapid growth, according to internal documents from GAM shared with POLITICO Magazine and Nielsen ratings. (Others include conservative media networks Fox News and Newsmax.) Over the same timespan, Hallmark's audience shrunk by 9 percent and Lifetime's by 13 percent, according to Nielsen ratings. Hallmark and Lifetime still maintain larger audiences in total than Great American Family, though. On the business side, many faith-based production companies follow a similar proposition to a channel like Hallmark: build out a slate of movies and TV shows that follow a tried and true formula of simple love stories and moral lessons. 'The reason the model works is because you keep budgets down. These are not genre films. These are not films that require an awful lot in terms of location. Often they're reusing actors,' says Adam Nayman, a Toronto-based film critic and professor at the University of Toronto. 'You kind of build up your own star system where these people are not stars, but they become recognizable to your audience.' GAM's streaming service is currently advertising 'Summer Romcoms' like Sweet Maple Romance, 'Military Heroes' like Peace River: God, Country & The Cowboy Way, and 'Stories of Faith' like Disciples in the Moonlight. The company also launched a specific childrens' hub on their streaming service this week. They are trying to build a catalog of films that fit together in one neat, Christian package. 'Sometimes you'll say, 'I love that show, but I don't know where it is — is this on Max? Is this on Netflix?'' said Kristen Roberts, Great American Media's chief revenue officer and executive vice president of programming, in a recent interview at GAM's New York offices. 'We want to be the complete opposite of that. We want people to say, 'I watch Pure Flix, I watch Great American Family,'' referencing two arms of GAM. The goal, she said, is for viewers to say, ''I watch that service' more than 'I watch that particular show.'' Faith-based networks also have the benefit of being able to position themselves in direct opposition with what they argue is a liberal agenda in Hollywood. The community of faith-based filmmakers can set themselves up as the antidote to cultural products that they see as inappropriate for children and adults alike. 'When you look at White Lotus and you look at situations where they're creating storylines that have incest in them and they're being applauded by the entertainment community, that's an intentional way of taking aberrant behavior and trying to normalize it,' Abbott said on the Moms for America podcast. 'We see it all the time in entertainment — every day. You can turn on almost any movie, any network, go to any movie, and I know it's a very intentional strategy.' The success of faith-based media companies is in large part a reaction to the kind of frustrations that Abbott elucidates. The industry is buoyed by the very thing that it rails against — and it's the response that drives some of the success. 'They've really not ever tried to pretend that they're for everyone,' says Nayman. 'Instead, they say, 'isn't this what you've been missing.' And if you're the one getting that message, and you're the one being reached by that advertisement, then your grievance is being stoked, even if it's underneath the guise of a warm hug.' 'You're assuming that people are fed up with anything that resembles something mainstream or something secular,' Nayman adds. 'And I think they really, really take advantage of a polarized moment.' There's tension between faith-based content and the rest of the media landscape. The faith-based films and television shows — when they're reviewed at all — are regularly panned by critics. Sound of Freedom, the film from this universe that was recently reviewed by the most mainstream critics, has a Metacritic score of 36 out of 100. 'It's bizarre, unsettling and yet — in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water — bracingly dull to boot,' read a review in The Telegraph. 'The quality is a really big issue,' Leo acknowledges. He argues conservatives need to invest in incubating talent that can make family-values movies and shows that are more slick, better produced and appeal to a wider audience. The art in this space often has no real aspirations towards acclaim as it's connoted by an Oscar or Emmy. In fact, in some ways they've created a parallel industry, with their own critics and markers of success. The Movieguide Awards, which are held every year and which largely honor films and television that Movieguide — a service that brands itself as 'movie reviews for Christians' — believes connects with their values. In 2025, winners included the movie Reagan, actor Candace Cameron Bure for A Christmas Less Traveled and Americans With No Address, a documentary about the country's homelessness crisis narrated by actor William Baldwin. Movieguide rates Hollywood films and gives them a 'family content' rating. In the company's annual 'Report to Hollywood,' they argue that films with strong Christian values perform better at the box office. Their formula relies on the often strong performance of children's films and doesn't include every mainstream hit; both Barbie and Oppenheimer had low 'family content' ratings, for example. 'We have a new generation that's having kids, and they want faith and values, their generation does not want sex and violence.' says Ted Baehr, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Movieguide. He cites this year's Academy Awards Best Picture winner Anora, about a New York sex worker, which made a little over $20 million at the domestic box office. 'In Hollywood [that] is pathetic,' he says. 'It's worthless. And all the Academy Award winners were pathetic.' (The film was generally considered an indie success; it was made on a $6 million budget.) While Hollywood has long been a bastion of liberalism, there wasn't always such a stark divide between mainstream Hollywood and religious fare. But in today's political climate, the gap is widening. According to April 2024 research from Pew, 59 percent of Protestants align with the Republican Party compared to 38 percent who align with Democrats, and among white Evangelical Protestants, 85 percent lean Republican while only 14 percent lean Democrat. Christians of all faiths are more likely to be Republicans, where Jews, Muslims and anyone unaffiliated with a particular religion are more likely to be a Democrat. The large partisan split among white Evangelical Protestants in particular has grown steadily and significantly since the start of the Reagan era. And that gap has been reflected in available entertainment options. In the Facebook group 'Great American Family (GAC) Fan Community', users post every day about how the network is one of the only ones that represents their interests, values and politics. In a recent post, a fan wrote, 'GAC SEEMS TO HAVE SOME GREAT PROGRAMMING COMING UP FOR GOOD FRIDAY INTO EASTER. THANK YOU! I SAW SOME DISTURBING STUFF ON A MOVIE WITH HALLMARK OVER THE WEEKEND. ONLY TUNED IT IN WHEN IT WAS ALMOST OVER AND IT WAS 10 MINUTES OF AGENDA!' Her post was flooded with supportive comments. 'Stopped watching Hallmark movies when they cowered to the masses allowing same sex couples. Don't miss it and LOVE Great American Family!!,' another member of the group replied. Abbott uses and cultivates that sense of cultural alienation to market his content. Along with A Christmas Spark — where after two days on set Lopez's character has moved from a big-city office setup to charming small-town USA — GAM's offerings include the upcoming Home Sweet Christmas Wedding starring Cameron Bure and a slate of released Easter-themed productions including Forty-Seven Days with Jesus. Watching GAM is not only an escape from Hollywood, but also a signifier of your own values or politics. While spending your money or time with a Great American Media product, you're voting for something. It's not about artistic innovation or form, it's about sending a message. 'I think that 'Christian' is used by the media to downplay or to stereotype,' Abbott told Moms for America. 'It's reverse racism or however you want to define it. You get stereotyped and put in this box. And that's what they want to do, they want to put faith in a box and make it go away. And we will never let that happen.' — Tessa Berenson Rogers contributed to this report.
