Pro-Christian fantasy continues surprise march to top of America's streaming charts: The series' creator now reveals how the hit has defied a mainstream media boycott... to topple Hollywood heavyweights

A hit show based on a New York Times bestselling book is topping the streaming charts, but you won't find a review of it in pages of The Gray Lady.

Even the movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes hasn't registered any critics' reviews of The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of Merlin, despite the seven-episode series rocketing to the number one fantasy title in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and across Europe.

Set before King Arthur's birth, season one follows Merlin, prophet and future mentor to Arthur. Merlin, positively depicted as a Christian in the series, is assumed dead or a fable, until he reemerges in post-Roman Britain to unite the fractured kingdoms under threat from Saxon invaders.

As of Wednesday, The Pendragon Cycle continued its break out of the fantasy genre, rising to the second most watched show in the US, across all of Prime Video (including both movies and streaming) in the US, behind only the blockbuster thriller series, Reacher, an Amazon Prime Video original.

Series creator and director Jeremy Boreing tells The Daily Mail in an exclusive interview that he believes The Pendragon Cycle has tapped into the interests of an underserved audience that wants content that celebrates, not demeans, the foundational narrative of Western culture.

'The show is for anyone who loves great fantasy, who loves historical fiction and likes stories that are imbued with hope and traditional values like duty and inheritance,' says Boreing. 'The show's not polemical, the show is not for conservatives, it's not for Christians in a way that's limiting.'

And yet, to Boreing, co-founder of the conservative news website The Daily Wire, it's hardly surprising that the mainstream media appears to be looking the other way.

They've disdained his work for decades, he says.

'For 15 consecutive months and 18 months total, [The Daily Wire] was the largest publisher in the world on Facebook,' says Boreing, reflecting on the company's early days. 'People were often very surprised and sometimes very offended by it. The New York Times would write pieces constantly about how wrong it was that these upstart internet reporters were beating the mighty New York Times.'

But, Boreing observes, left-wing criticism only had the contradictory effect of boosting the Daily Wire's visibility and viewership. Now, he says, the cultural critics have appeared to take another approach.

'They learned that a far better tool in their arsenal is to ignore us than to try to meet us on the battlefield,' he says. 'They have that advantage because they control so many of the institutions of public life. If they ignore us, that's a way of shutting us out of the conversation.'

Good luck with that. 

Despite a near-total legacy media blackout and scant paid publicity, viewership of The Pendragon Cycle is growing by the day. Boreing explains the success by pointing to strong word-of-mouth recommendations, good timing and a touch of divine intervention.

'We're so used to sort of nihilistic fantasy shows over the last 20 years… To have a show that puts forward an optimistic vision of our civilization, a proud vision of our history that isn't promulgating nihilism or despair, that isn't rolling its eyes at our history, I think appeals to an enormous number of people and that audience is very vocal when they find something that speaks to them.'

Finally, Boreing doesn't attribute the series' success to earthly influences alone.

'In a way, I'm forced to conclude that… whatever success the show is enjoying today, we must credit God with. We've put enormous effort into it, but there's no way to attribute the level of its success to our efforts alone. It's far transcended what we would have been capable of achieving.'

Released in January on the subscription service DailyWire+, the series initially failed to gain traction until debuting in the UK in July, which was a surprise to many, including Boreing. Since stepping down as co-CEO of The Daily Wire in March, Boreing was not directly involved in the distribution of the series.

'I actually didn't know that we had premiered in the UK on Prime until Stephen Lawhead, the author of the novels [that the series is adapted from], sent me an email that morning,' Boreing says.

Boreing tells The Daily Mail that he spent three decades trying to bring Lawhead's series to the big screen after encountering the material as a young man. Along the way, he determined that he needed to found a business to achieve his vision.

'I had to create a media company that could both afford to make the show that had the wherewithal to market the show and had the ability to monetize and distribute the show,' he explains.

Today, Boreing says he continues his mission to help create a culture for conservatives, instead of simply criticizing the status quo. In this crusade, he finds himself taking on both the Left and a man who he seems to describe as a right-wing apostate.

'There is a war for the soul of the American right and Tucker Carlson represents one side of that battle. I am actively attempting to advance the other side of that battle,' he says.

'To the extent that Tucker tells the right that all of America's greatest accomplishments were evil, that all of the worst evils visited upon America were deserved or self-inflicted, that he tells the right that they are victims of the elite, that they are victims of Israel and the Jews, that they are victims of conspiracies far greater than they could imagine. I'm telling the Americans, no, you have a proud history, you have a proud heritage.'

'The West is imperfect, like all peoples and cultures are imperfect, but we have done great good in the world and we have great good left to do. We are people of agency who can, and because we can, should, and because we should, must, continue to promulgate goodness into the world and not give in to the politics of nihilism, anger and despair that people like Tucker Carlson and the Left have been promulgating in this country and in Western civilization more broadly.'

Ironically, the fate of Boreing's The Pendragon Cycle is no longer his to determine.

'I no longer lead the company that I helped to build,' says Boreing, 'so today, the success of the show lies in the hands of the audience and in the hands of the Daily Wire.'

Whether there is an audience hungry enough to demand more of this content remains to be seen.