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.’”