In September, NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, debuted a new television adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, based on the follow-up novel to the smash hit The Da Vinci Code. One of the most anticipated novels of all time, The Lost Symbol sold a million copies the first day it was released in 2009 and stayed on the bestseller list for 29 weeks.
The novel also touched off a sudden explosion of interest in Freemasonry, which provides a mysterious backdrop to the plot of the story. In fact, the term “Freemason” ended 2009 among the top 10 search terms on Yahoo, and during one six-week period, was the subject of 127 major-media stories, including from NBC’s Dateline and Today shows.
The new television series stars Ashley Zuckerman as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and Eddie Izzard as the Mason-historian Peter Solomon. Just don’t expect it to kick up as much controversy for Masonry as The Da Vinci Code did for its mysterious fraternal orders: “I have enormous respect for the Masons,” Brown told the Associated Press. “Here is a worldwide organization that essentially says, `We don’t care what you call God, or what you think about God, only that you believe in a god and let’s all stand together as brothers and look in the same direction.’”
Read the Spotlight on Freemasonry issue of California Freemason magazine here. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is streaming now on Peacock, with new episodes released each Thursday.