Vogue–April, 2006

People are Talking About Television

All Aboard
From Moses at the Pharaoh's court to cool Rodeo Drive Thieves to critters on Corfu, Joan Juliet Buck travels from B.C. to A.D. for the great new spring shows.

(Excerpt) Television is not an easy medium for God. But for Easter, there's the Ten Commandments miniseries on ABC, a lush, straightforward version cast as if it were a very good party, with Naveen Andrews from Lost, Linus Roache (conflicted hero in the film Priest), Mia Maestro (cute girlfriend in the Motorcycle Diaries), the wonderful Paul Rhys (Chaplin's brother in Chaplin), and Padma Lakshmi (gorgeous Indian wife of Salman Rushdie). The Egyptian court life is rendered in bright, luxurious scenes full of weird detail. The child Moses, head shaved, eyes outlined with black, is taken down into a chamber with his step-brother Menerith to watch a priest dig around a corpse' entrails, and annoys his tutor by asking, "Who made the gods?" The roiling dark sky that announces God looks just like the illustrations in my all-color Old Testament for children, except that this time, a mushroom cloud is brought in to help part the Red Sea. The adult Moses is played by the Scottish actor Dougray Scott, whose blue eyes and dark hair evoke a general air of Mel Gibson and with him the feverish flavor of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.