Pendragon Cycle Reaches Prime After Daily Wire’s Long Bet

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin ranks No. 3 among Prime Video’s U.S. TV shows after arriving on the service on September 1, 2026. It is the No. 1 fantasy series on that platform, and Boreing Media’s press notes put it at No. 4 among all U.S. Prime titles as of September 9.

Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, who created and directed the seven-part series, spent January through March running it as a subscriber exclusive. Prime is where people who never paid that bill started watching.

The January Premiere Stayed Behind a Paywall

DailyWire+ set January 22, 2026 as the public premiere after giving All Access members episodes 1 and 2 on Christmas Day 2025. New chapters then arrived on Thursdays until the finale, “The Last True Bard,” on March 5, a six-week run of 42 days. The series still streams for DailyWire+ subscribers.

Boreing had called the project “among the largest, most ambitious independent series ever produced” and “the culmination of a ten-year vision to create culture, not just to criticize it.” CEO Caleb Robinson called it “a true milestone” for Daily Wire Entertainment and said the audience “deserves stories told with this level of craft and conviction.”

The official teaser that went out with that date promise is the one most subscribers saw first.

Inside that wall, the show did what a club show does. It held the people who already paid. It did not pick up the critic class that covers Netflix and HBO. Rotten Tomatoes logged one critic review against more than 500 audience ratings. Major reviewers simply did not file.

The January run already showed the grit this faith-television series aimed for, even when the room was mostly the company’s own subscribers. Some of those subscribers bounced off the opening, which spends its first hour on Atlantis, bull leaping, and a princess named Charis rather than on Camelot. Others stayed, then asked for more episodes that have not been ordered.

HOW THE BET MOVED

1. November 2022: DailyWire+ buys screen rights to Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle novels.
2. September to December 2023: The company films in Hungary and Italy across 140 unit days and 70 calendar days, including Fossanova Abbey on October 11 and battle work at Göböljárás in December.
3. December 25, 2025: All Access members get episodes 1 and 2.
4. January 22, 2026: The seven-part series premieres on DailyWire+; weekly Thursday drops follow.
5. March 5, 2026: The finale airs.
6. July 2026: Colin Cunningham wins a Leo Award for King Vortigern.
7. June to August 2026: The series charts on Prime Video in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal.
8. September 1, 2026: Prime Video adds it in the United States and Canada.

That sequence is the wager in calendar form. Make the show. Lock it to the app. Then, after the locked run is over, let a bigger pipe carry it.

Prime Video Took What Other Streamers Refused

Boreing has said the company took the finished series out to other streamers because the scale was new for Daily Wire and they wanted as many eyes as they could get. He said they heard compliments from places that do not share the company’s politics. He also said they could not close a deal, so DailyWire+ kept the first window.

Prime later took the same seven episodes. In Britain and Ireland the show reached No. 3 among TV shows and No. 1 in fantasy. Spain held it for 44 days. Portugal kept it on the board for 36. On September 9, Boreing posted the U.S. scoreboard himself.

My beautiful friends (and my beautiful detractors!),

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is now #4 Overall and the #3 TV Show on Prime US.

I am filled with gratitude.

The cast and crew thank you all. So do I. pic.twitter.com/lrWU6idfGH

— Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) September 9, 2026

PRIME VIDEO PEAKS

Those peak positions across six countries come from Boreing Media’s press notes, which mix Amazon’s own U.S. badges with FlixPatrol reads abroad for June 21 through September 9, 2026. The U.S. row is Amazon’s: a fantasy badge at No. 1 from September 4 to 6, then No. 3 among TV shows and No. 4 among all titles on September 9, after eight days on the domestic chart.

The series is on the U.S. Prime Video listing from September 1, 2026, with Canada added the same day. Households that would not buy a Daily Wire plan can now start episode 1 with the rest of their Prime queue. That is the part of the wager the January exclusive could not test.

140 Shoot Days and a 25-Year Script

Boreing has said he first tried to write a screen version of Lawhead’s books at 21, in a North Hollywood apartment, without even knowing what an option was. In 2023 he told Daily Wire readers he had wanted the books on screen for 25 years, and he left his co-CEO post for the shoot. He stepped away from that job in 2025 and now runs Boreing Media.

Producers have described the seven episodes as an eight-figure season, with more than seven figures in each chapter. That is not HBO money. It is a lot of money for a news company. Dallas Sonnier, the Bonfire Legend producer who has shepherded Daily Wire films from What Is a Woman? to Terror on the Prairie, executive produced. Ryan Whitaker directed three episodes and wrote. Jesse V. Johnson directed two. Boreing wrote and directed the first two, which open on Atlantis and the bard Taliesin rather than on Merlin as a wizard in a pointed hat.

Lawhead is a producer. Kyle McCuiston wrote the score. Delivered masters run 56 to 69 minutes, 7 hours 27 minutes in all. DailyWire+ listings run a little longer because they carry recaps. The company shot lakes and halls around Budapest and used Fossanova Abbey in Italy as a standing set of stone. In a production diary Boreing put the labor in plain terms: 140 unit days on a 70-day calendar.

Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson are among the executive producers. So is Daniel Kresmery. The credits read like a company betting its balance sheet on one story, then sending its co-founder to Hungary to finish it.

Viewer Scores Rise After the Atlantis Open

IMDb users were cooler on the first night than on the back half. “Island of the Mighty” has a 7.1 from 718 ratings. By episode 6, “Ganieda,” the same board is at 8.1 from 375 ratings. The finale sits at 7.7. That climb matches what a lot of first-run viewers said in public: the show is confusing until it stops being a legend about Merlin’s parents and becomes a legend about Merlin.

Rose Reid, who plays Charis, co-wrote episode 2 and wrote episode 6. The highest-rated chapter is hers. It is also the chapter that brings former Daily Wire host Brett Cooper on as Ganieda, the huntress of Celyddon. Cooper does not play a cameo of herself. She plays the woman who tests Merlin after his exile.

THE SEVEN EPISODES

• Episode 1: “Island of the Mighty,” January 22, 2026, 7.1 from 718 IMDb ratings, 01:07:45, written and directed by Jeremy Boreing.
• Episode 2: “The Vision of Taliesin,” January 22, 2026, 7.4 from 530 ratings, 01:03:45, written by Boreing and Rose Reid.
• Episode 3: “A Fatherless Child,” January 29, 2026, 7.6 from 436 ratings, 00:56:27, directed by Jesse V. Johnson, the Vortigern chapter.
• Episode 4: “The King of Maridunum,” February 5, 2026, 7.5 from 384 ratings, 01:04:55, written and directed by Ryan Whitaker.
• Episode 5: “The Price of Failure,” February 12, 2026, 7.7 from 350 ratings, 01:09:24, written by Josiah Nelson.
• Episode 6: “Ganieda,” February 19, 2026, 8.1 from 375 ratings, 00:57:44, written by Rose Reid.
• Episode 7: “The Last True Bard,” March 5, 2026, 7.7 from 263 ratings, 01:07:16, written by Nelson, Whitaker, and Boreing.

Early viewers complained that plot seemed to vanish between episodes 1 and 2. Later viewers said the battles, the sword, and Tom Sharp’s Merlin were the reason to stay. Both can be true. The series is built from Lawhead’s first two novels, Taliesin and Merlin, and it spends scarce runtime on a drowning island before it ever reaches Britain’s war bands.

Why the Cast Has Almost No Stars

Boreing’s press notes say he cast almost entirely unknown actors on purpose. He did not want a face bigger than the project. He wanted a company for whom this was the largest thing they had ever done. Tom Sharp, a British actor, plays Merlin. Reid plays Charis, the Atlantean princess who becomes his mother. James Arden is Taliesin. Finney Cassidy is Aurelius. Myles Clohessy is Uther. Emree Franklin is Morgian. Daniel Fathers is King Avallach.

Colin Cunningham, the exception with a long television résumé, plays Vortigern, the king whose tower will not stand. Sharp opens the story as the man who will put a sword in a stone, and the press stills give him the line “I am the man who made him.” Cooper’s Ganieda arrives late, which is how Lawhead wrote her, and how a company with one famous host on the call sheet chose to use that host.

Watching audiences find this show on their own has been one of the great joys of my career. These stories are one of our great civilizational inheritances, and I’m thrilled they’re about to reach a far bigger audience here at home.

Jeremy Boreing, series creator, Boreing Media press notes

Academy Award winner Roger Avary, who co-wrote Pulp Fiction, is quoted in those notes as “Completely blown away.” That is a filmmaker talking about craft. It is not a critic’s score. The people who assign those scores mostly never came.

A Leo Award Did Not Change the Review Drought

In July 2026 Cunningham won Best Lead Performance, Dramatic Series at the Leo Awards, British Columbia’s film and television honors, for Vortigern. The win followed Cunningham’s earlier Leo Award nomination, a result that treated the show as acting, not as a pamphlet.

It did not produce a stack of U.S. reviews. The Daily Wire name still travels ahead of Sharp’s face and ahead of Lawhead’s plot. Some Prime newcomers say they delayed pressing play for that reason, then stayed. Others bounce off the plaster-and-sunlight look of the Atlantis scenes, or off a Christian thread they find too plain. The argument on the platform is no longer “will this exist.” It is whether the first two hours earn the next five.

Boreing now addresses “friends” and “detractors” in the same post. He knows the brand is still the fight. The chart is his evidence that the fight is no longer the whole audience.

Lawhead’s Britain Still Has Books Waiting

Lawhead’s cycle, published from the 1980s, plants Arthur in sub-Roman Britain rather than in a high medieval court. The first novel, Taliesin, won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s Gold Medallion Award for Fiction in 1988. On screen, barbarians press the Island of the Mighty, Christianity is a new and contested faith, and Merlin is a prophetic figure, not a court magician with fireworks.

Boreing’s own pitch for the series was a set of questions: what it is to be a man, to have a mission, to believe in God and in Christ in a world that does not want that. He has said that if God is real, he must be God of now and of then. The show is not shy about baptism, prayer, and a sword that is Britain. It is also not a sermon with horses. The violence is closer to a war band than to a Sunday school pageant, which is why some church viewers warned friends about blood and why some fantasy viewers were surprised it was watchable at all.

A continuation has not been announced. Lawhead’s later novels are sitting there if anyone writes the checks. On Prime, new viewers are still reaching the last image of the seven episodes, a sword driven into a stone, without ever opening a Daily Wire app.