The Daily Wire celebrated its ten-year anniversary recently, and with that, they have offered their first long-form series, The Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of Merlin. The trailer already has over 400K views in 24 hours, which isn’t bad. Here is the trailer:
Episodes 1 and 2 will be released for All Access members on Christmas Day 2025. The rest will be released on Daily Wire+ January 22, 2026.
Three episodes of the show are directed by Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, with Ryan Whitaker and Jesse V. Johnson directing other episodes. Most of the actors are not household names as such, with the possible exception of Brett Cooper, who is in just one episode.
The first thing I notice about this show is that it is not performatively “woke,” meaning it isn’t cast to meet the demands of activists, but rather in keeping with the Celtic Britons and Anglo-Saxons of the King Arthur era. Others might say it’s all white actors. And, probably, critics of the show, should they have the courage to actually watch it and review it, will likely point that out. It takes place in the world of King Arthur, so old England, right? That makes it accurate, I suppose, although Hollywood would never dare. You can read more about the book series here.
The Daily Wire has been attempting to build culture outside of the Left’s control of it. They’re the first in the counterculture/Conservative lane to build something that big. The outsider industry is still in its early stages and will get better over time, at least I hope so, because much of what the Left offers up is so rigidly politically correct it’s impossible to watch any of it.
Hollywood under the Left’s control only has two avenues of expression: calling much of the country racists and bizarre boundary-less sexual content, as we saw in Monster: The Ed Gein story. While it’s true that Elon Musk and other Conservatives’ efforts to boycott Netflix for pushing transgender ideology into children’s content, it was like a drop of water in the ocean. It made no impact, or not much anyway. Netflix isn’t sweating it, put it that way.
And they’ll probably turn Lizzie Borden into yet another extreme violence/fetish/soft-core porn series, too. They have to keep raising the shock value bar, though I think they went as far as they could possibly go with Ed Gein, though I guess we’ll have to see. Oh, I long for a great documentary series on these subjects. Like, if only it had been about the making of Psycho. Remember Capote? Back when storytelling still had power and it wasn’t just content in/content out?
But the Ed Gein thing was, I thought, so off the rails it makes a good argument for the return of the Hays Code. Why would they think making Ed Gein a sex symbol was anything beyond serial killer fetish porn? Parts of it were interesting, but every time we saw Ed Gain involved in some sex act with poor Leslie Manville, I’m thinking, you know, we’ve lost the plot here, folks. And no one will say anything lest they be seen as puritans — except that they ARE puritans, just not in that way.
So we do need a counterculture and not a moment too soon. I hope the Pendragon Cycle is great. I really do. I congratulate the Daily Wire for dreaming big.
