Fox Nation Premiere of Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Saints’ Felt Like a Massive Victory Lap

The second season of Fox Nation’s The Saints premiered Monday night at an exclusive midtown hotel screening that felt, unmistakably, like a Fox News victory lap. Academy Award–winner Martin Scorsese — the creative force behind the series — took questions afterward, lending the night a level of cultural prestige rarely associated with a cable-news streamer.

For the uninitiated, The Saints is Scorsese’s docudrama chronicling the lives of canonized figures whose mythologies often overshadow the real events that defined their faith. Hosted, narrated, and executive-produced by Scorsese, the series aims to strip away legend and illuminate the human drama underlying sainthood. It’s a big-budget program shot on location overseas. No one will mistake it for Game of Thrones, but for streaming platform content? It’s beyond next-level.

The evening opened with remarks from Chief Digital Officer & Chief Marketing Officer Jason Klarman, followed by Matti Leshem, the creator and producer of the show. Attendees were then shown screenings of the season’s first and final episodes. Scorsese and his daughter, Francesca Scorsese — director of the finale — then took the stage for a Q&A.

A sizable roster of Fox News talent turned out — Bill Hemmer, Sandra Smith, Harris Faulkner, Kayleigh McEnany — alongside senior executives, President & Executive Editor, Fox News Media Jay Wallace, President & Editor-in-Chief of Fox News Digital. Porter Berry, and Fox Nation president Lauren Petterson. Afterward, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres set a celebratory tone. And why not? By nearly every measurable standard, Fox News is having a moment.

Look at the scoreboard: while competitors scramble to reinvent themselves, Fox News is coming up aces — or, in this case, Scorseses.

Over the summer, Fox News’ primetime slate was the highest-rated block on all of television, beating even the broadcast networks. Quarterly ad revenue is hitting record levels. The network’s opinion shows can be fairly criticized for their Trump-centric worldview and selective relationship with traditional journalism, but within the infotainment-driven ecosystem that now defines cable, Fox’s model remains both politically dominant and commercially unmatched.

And about that looming apocalypse of cord-cutting: Fox saw it early. Fox Nation launched nearly seven years ago and now boasts roughly two to two-and-a-half million subscribers, per Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch. Respectable numbers on their own; in context, they’re commanding.

Meanwhile, MSNBC is rebranding as MSNOW, and CNN is taking another swing at streaming only four years after CNN+ died in a month. Fox isn’t just ahead of the curve — it’s lapping the field. If inviting Scorsese to anchor a platform-exclusive series is any indication, Fox Nation now looks less like a scrappy side project and more like a varsity program dunking on amateurs.

To be clear: Fox Nation is not a news service. Conceived by CEO of Fox News Media Suzanne Scott, it functions more like a lifestyle platform for Fox’s most loyal audience — patriotic, often Christian, and in step with the culture-war narratives that animate Fox opinion programming from Fox & Friends through Gutfeld! Klarman gave Scott an appropriate shout-out at the start of the night, thanking her for “green lighting the entire project after launching Fox Nation” nearly a decade ago “before any news network had the foresight to create a streaming service, much less had the audience to make it successful.”

When Fox Nation launched in 2018, cynics mocked it as a digital add-on for retirees in gated communities — the sort of grandparents who need help setting up an app, evidenced by the blinking “12:00” on a VCR.

I remember a December 2018 Fox & Friends segment in which future Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered an on-air tutorial for how to download the app — a moment that felt like an accidental confession about the disconnect between a digital product and its out-of-demo analog viewers. I considered writing it up but passed, worried it felt too mean — and likely off-base.

And now we know: it was flat-out wrong.

In recent years, Fox Nation has quietly become a destination for Hollywood passion projects. Beyond Scorsese, the platform has hosted work from Kevin Costner (Yellowstone: One-Fifty), Matthew McConaughey (Deep in the Heart), Kelsey Grammer, Rob Lowe, Dennis Quaid, Dan Aykroyd, Kevin Nealon, and others — a roster of talent that rivals prestige-streaming originals.

At this point, Fox Nation is the most successful news-adjacent streaming platform — and it’s not close. No, it doesn’t simulcast Fox News’ core programming (much of which is readily accessible via FoxNews.com). But if Fox ever wants to shift tentpole shows like Hannity, The Five, or Outnumbered to streaming — or renegotiate carriage fees with increasingly uneasy cable providers — it will do so from a position of unambiguous strength.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.