Primetime Preacher$ on Netflix: What Happened to Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell?

Before reality TV, before influencers, there were TV preachers. In the 1980s, a handful of evangelists ran broadcasting empires that reached millions of American homes every night, raised staggering sums from viewers and had real political pull in Washington.

Then it all came apart, one scandal at a time, with the preachers turning on each other in public. Netflix’s Primetime Preacher$ tells that story. Here’s who’s who, what happened and what became of everyone afterward.

What is Primetime Preacher$ about?

Netflix describes it as an investigation into “the combustible mix of faith, ambition, scandal, and rivalry” in the golden age of televangelism. It follows three men who built huge TV ministries, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, and how their work pushed evangelical Christianity into American politics. A sex scandal then set off a public war between them that exposed the rivalries behind the sermons.

Director Joe Berlinger is an Oscar nominee best known for true-crime work like Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Jason Bateman, who played a very different kind of scam artist on Ozark, is a producer.

Jim Bakker: from PTL to prison

Then: Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye started out in children’s TV on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. In 1974 Bakker launched the PTL Satellite Network, whose flagship PTL Club drew up to 13 million viewers a night at its mid-1980s peak. PTL also built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park and resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina.

In March 1987, Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn and resigned. Jerry Falwell took over PTL. In 1989 Bakker was convicted of fraud tied to PTL’s finances and sentenced to 45 years, later reduced to eight. He was paroled in 1994.

Later: Bakker remarried in 1998 and in 2003 started The Jim Bakker Show, filmed near Branson, Missouri. In 2021 he and his production company settled a lawsuit over claims that a silver supplement could cure COVID-19, agreeing to $156,000 in refunds. He died on October 5, 2026, at 86, his wife Lori said.

Tammy Faye Bakker

Tammy Faye, famous for her heavy mascara and her singing, stood by Jim through the collapse. The couple divorced in 1992, and she later married Roe Messner, a contractor who had worked on Heritage USA. She died of colon cancer in 2007. Jessica Chastain won the Best Actress Oscar for playing her in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021).

Jimmy Swaggart: “I have sinned”

Then: Swaggart was one of the most powerful TV preachers in the country and one of Bakker’s loudest critics. He had also accused fellow preacher Marvin Gorman of sexual misconduct. Gorman struck back by hiring a photographer, who caught Swaggart with a sex worker at a motel in 1988.

Swaggart’s tearful televised apology, “I have sinned against you,” became one of the most famous clips of the decade. He was later defrocked by the Assemblies of God. In 1991 police in California stopped him with another sex worker in his car. He also paid Gorman $1.8 million to settle a defamation suit.

Later: Swaggart kept preaching through his own ministry in Baton Rouge, often alongside his son Donnie. He died on July 1, 2025, at 90.

Jerry Falwell: the man who took over PTL

Then: Falwell, a Baptist pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia, founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and was one of the most influential religious figures in American politics. When Bakker resigned, Falwell stepped in to run PTL, a move Bakker later described as a hostile takeover. Falwell promised to slide down a water slide at Heritage USA if donors raised enough money, and he did, in his suit.

Later: Falwell led Liberty University, which he had founded, until his death in May 2007. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr., later ran the university before resigning in 2020 amid his own scandal.

Jessica Hahn

Hahn’s account of what happened with Bakker in 1980 was at the center of the PTL scandal, and the documentary revisits her allegations. She briefly became a media figure in the late 1980s and has since kept a much lower profile.

Is Primetime Preacher$ worth watching?

If you loved The Eyes of Tammy Faye, HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones or any of Berlinger’s true-crime documentaries, this is an easy pick. The archival footage alone, the sets, the hair, the tears, is something else. We’ll add our full verdict after release.

FAQ

Watch the official trailer on YouTube.