Joseph Smith
Format
Historical Drama/Biopic (7 Seasons)
Amid the religious upheaval of the 19th-century, a simple farm boy claiming prophetic authority amasses thousands of followers and attempts to build Zion on the American frontier, forcing a nation to confront how much belief it is willing to tolerate.
Logline
Synopsis
Joseph Smith is a seven-season prestige historical drama that traces the rise of a teenage farm boy into one of the most influential and controversial figures in American history. Set against the raw, often violent backdrop of early 19th-century America, the series follows Joseph Smith from obscurity in rural New York to his emergence as a religious leader, political agitator, city-builder, and founder of a new American faith.
Told with close attention to historical record and firsthand accounts, the series charts not only the growth of a movement, but the transformation of a man. What begins as a deeply personal search for forgiveness and salvation expands into an audacious attempt to restore divine order through scripture, covenants, priesthood, and temple-building. As followers gather and cities rise, so do opposition, fear, and consequence, forcing Joseph to navigate leadership under relentless pressure and mounting risk.
At its heart, Joseph Smith is an intimate and deeply human story. It asks why so many people chose to follow this man, what it cost them to do so, and how one individual’s pursuit of salvation reshaped a nation. More than the rise of a religion, the series explores the burden of belief, the price of authority, and the moral complexity of a life spent trying to build heaven on earth.
Comps
Our Approach
Joseph Smith is the flagship series of 1830 Studios and the creative project that gathers all of our storytelling ambitions into a single work. Designed for a broad, secular audience and built for premium streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon, the series approaches its subject not as religious instruction, but as prestige historical drama, emotionally layered, historically precise, and deeply human. It engages the same timeless questions found across all of our series, authority, covenant, freedom, tribulation, and hope, through the life of one of the most consequential and controversial figures in American history.
Our approach is intentionally restrained and unconventional for a Latter-day Saint production. The series portrays no on-screen visions, angels, miracles, or supernatural events. Instead, the story is told entirely through observable human experience, grounded in events acknowledged by both Latter-day Saint and non-member historians, and informed by the same spirit of rigorous, secular scholarship exemplified by Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling. Like the people who knew Joseph Smith in his own day, the audience encounters only a man, his words, his actions, and the communities that form around him, and must decide what to make of him.
We do not argue for or against Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims. Rather, we invite viewers to judge those claims by their fruits: the devotion they inspired, the controversy they ignited, the sacrifices they demanded, and the consequences, both redemptive and devastating, that followed. By focusing on outcomes rather than assertions, the series creates space for empathy without requiring belief, allowing viewers to engage the story with the same openness they bring to great biopics and prestige biographical dramas.
The long-form, seven-season structure is essential to this approach. It allows the series to resist simplification, contextualize controversy, and portray Joseph Smith in his full complexity, his conviction and charisma, his flaws and failures, his growth and contradictions. Rather than compressing a life into a single interpretation, the audience lives with Joseph over time, watching him struggle, lead, falter, and change.
The result is not propaganda, apology, or polemic, but an unflinching human portrait, one that trusts the story itself to withstand scrutiny, and trusts that meaning will emerge through the lived reality of a man, a movement, and the world they irrevocably changed.