Martin Scorsese attends the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 10, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Lionel Hahn/Getty Images)
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Amid the familiar mix of political, lifestyle, and cultural programming that defines the Fox Nation streaming service, its most-watched titles include a striking outlier — a docuseries about Christian saints, narrated by Martin Scorsese.
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, which returns to the Fox News Media platform today for its eight-part second season, is not only hosted, narrated, and executive-produced by the Academy Award-winning director. The Dec. 7 finale that will focus on the newly canonized Carlo Acutis, a teenager from Italy who died in 2006, was directed by Scorsese’s 26-year-old daughter Francesca. The episode marks her first formal collaboration with her father — and, speaking of her father, the series itself is written by one of Scorsese’s frequent collaborators, Kent Jones.
The first half of the new season profiles Saint Patrick, Saint Peter, and Thomas Becket.
Fox’s streaming platform, series creator Matti Leshem told me, turned out to be the perfect partner for the series. “Fox Nation knew they were taking a risk, and they took it with remarkable faith,” he said. The audience, he continued, is more eclectic than outsiders might assume, and viewers of all backgrounds have apparently tuned in.
When I asked Leshem what first drew him to stories about the saints, he pointed back to childhood. “My father was a devout atheist — yet paradoxically had sent me to Ramaz, an Orthodox Jewish school,” he said. A family move to Denmark eventually placed him in a Catholic school run by the Assumption Sisters. “My gateway to the saints was the Nativity,” he explained. He’d been cast as the innkeeper in the school play, and the story took hold.
“From childhood until now, I’ve been fascinated by how people connect to their faith — by the fragile bridge between doubt and conviction.”
That early interest followed him into adulthood, and he spent more than a year shaping his own version of The Saints before ever meeting Scorsese. “Mr. Scorsese is one of the most learned and spiritually attuned people I’ve ever met … It was as if two people, working entirely independently, had arrived at the same impulse — and in meeting, that impulse came into focus.”
The docuseries is part of a growing slate of Fox Nation content that includes access to primetime Fox shows like Hannity and The Ingraham Angle, as well as a shows and specials hosted by Fox personalities and celebrities. Examples of the latter include Kelsey Grammer’s Historic Battles for America and Yellowstone: One-Fifty with Kevin Costner.
The $7.99/month service is separate from the recently-launched Fox One streamer, which includes live and on-demand content from Fox and is targeted toward cord-cutters (a bundle that includes Fox Nation is also available).
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints was born out of Leshem having an allotment of less than an hour to present his idea to the director. Leshem said the two men ended up talking for hours, with that single meeting launching a creative partnership now entering its second season. “Modern life grows ever more complex, yet people everywhere are reexamining their spiritual lives,” Leshem said. “The Saints opens that door.”