Shows we love:  exit Kings? Not necessarily
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
Kings is the kind of program that NBC hasn’t had in years, at least not since The West Wing ended: a pure, grown-up drama that isn’t in the cops-and-doctors genre. Inspired by the biblical chapters about David and Goliath, King Saul, and Saul’s son Jonathan, the show draws parallels with those parables while going well beyond the original tales to examine timeless issues of ethics, war, politics, and human character. In that respect, it is very like The West Wing and the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica as well as the best episodes of the Star Trek franchise. It's also marvelously well cast

What’s most remarkable is that despite everything it had going for it, Kings got canceled after 12 episodes that almost nobody knew about. If more people had known, they’d have seen it and been glad. Splendidly reimagined in modern terms, Kings is set in the ersatz contemporary coastal kingdom of Gilboa, for which you can substitute New York, Washington, London, Beijing, several central African regimes, or pretty much any modern capital located in an industrialized nation.

Gilboa is led by King Silas Benjamin, a former general who dethroned and imprisoned his former monarch and dragged his nation into the 21st century, both modernizing it drastically and enmeshing it in costly warfare with less than impressed neighbors. The young David in this case is Captain David Shepherd, who serves his king and country loyally despite grave misgivings and in the process becomes a hero uncomfortable in the limelight, providing a very public contrast to the less than scrupulous monarch. And from there, the conflicts and combatants multiply, even (most pointedly) within the royal family. Nearly everyone but David is ambitious and maneuvering for something.