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.

The series is peopled with a large, varied, captivating ensemble; no perfect people here, only a few who are trying for goodness and spiritual nobility amid many more of vague, dubious, or declining ethical character. No naivete, but as with the recent BSG, a bit of early innocence tempered by plenty of morally ambiguous dilemmas. The characters are complex, well drawn, remarkably well cast and well played, accessible but not predictable.

The cast, led by the impressive Ian McShane as King Silas, never fails to strike just the right note of revelation bound up in mystery, with everything and everyone in conflict no matter how loud the clamor for peace. Susanna Thompson is his regal, pragmatic, politically smooth but cutthroat and very well matched queen. Sebastian Stan plays the king's surly, unhappy, resentful and vengeful son, Allison Miller the dutiful but ultimately torn daughter who falls for the young captain, her social inferior. The part of Captain Shepherd seems tailor made for Chris Egan, who inhabits the role of a wary, battle-worn David effortlessly. The queen's conniving war profiteer brother is craftily played by Dylan Baker, and the splendid Eamonn Walker's portrayal of Rev. Samuels as a latter-day doomsaying prophet is enough to give you shivers. A supporting cast that includes Sarita Choudhury, Wes Studi, Marlyne Barrett and (surprise!) Macaulay Culkin, in a thankless, ironic role that suits him completely, all acquit themselves well. Not one actor seems less than perfect or out of place.

Same for the plots: they’re arresting and intriguing, without going over the top and out of control like Lost did. Quite the contrary; these plots are perfectly credible without being the least bit boring or strained. The scripts are well crafted gems of language that does exactly what it needs to do and not one whit more, retaining a generous amount of suspense.

Everyone speaks in complete sentences, which seem to flow naturally from their respective personae. For that fact alone, through which the writers credit the audience’s intelligence, writer-producer Michael Green deserves loud, protracted applause. Just the way in which each character uses language tells us who he or she is and who each wants to be: like the music in opera, the way each person uses words is a form of shorthand that reveals character and intent every bit as much as facial expressions and body language do. Yet nobody sounds like anyone else. What a beautiful use of language, and what a joy to listen to these people talk.

Finally: a network TV program that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve lost I.Q. points by watching it. It’s good enough to have been made for public television; you’d think it was perhaps a modern mini-series for Masterpiece Theatre, along the lines of Traffic, if you didn’t know better. No wonder I got hooked on the first episode.

Add to that some prodigiously high production values (thank you!!), and you have such a winning series that one has to believe NBC deliberately went out of its way from the start to derail this show. How else can one explain the frugal, horribly mismanaged, almost nonexistent marketing? A March premiere, in the middle of the spring TV season? What were they thinking??!

I’d never heard of Kings until it went into summer reruns; and even then, it landed on the Saturday night schedule – during SUMMER, for heaven’s sake, when nobody expects to be home on a Saturday night (certainly not I: I’ve been reduced to either taping it or watching it online because I try not to be home Saturday nights). Seriously? Earth to NBC: is the air so thin up there in your terminally out-of-touch ivory towers that you-all passed out, or were your execs just too embarrassed about the way Kings stood out against your pitiful, juvenile, ill-conceived unreality-show-and-sitcom roster and rendered the latter unwatchable by comparison? What else can account for such complete bloody-mindedness by NBC? Grow up, already!

Kings needs to move to a network that can make the most of it and promote the hell out of it – probably to cable. If you want a lesson on how to do this, take a gander at the selling of Torchwood, season 3: nearly everywhere I turn, cable or broadcast, there are promos for this, and all of them made me want to see more. It’s not that hard to do marketing right.

In fact, Kings would be a nice fit on HBO, right after True Blood – the two shows would have between them the same kind of one-two punch that made both The Closer and Saving Grace such smash hits on TNT, or that Burn Notice and Royal Pains are becoming on USA Network. I’d think that if the choice is HBO, Kings would make a good match for True Blood, at 10pm/9pm Central, given that Kings is appropriately all drama (reminiscent of MI-5), whereas True Blood is both scary and whimsical without ever losing its drama or descending into the pointlessly gory and camp (well, not much, at least until its sixth season, when it needlessly jumped the shark). Fans of HBO's Deadwood also might find themselves surprisingly drawn into Kings, given plenty of suspense in both shows and a similar well-crafted use of language; and in both series, individual episodes work as stand-alone modern fables while simultaneously knitting into larger, more complex and compelling story arcs.

Conversely, Kings fans might appreciate True Blood’s bit of comic relief mixed into the spooky, strange and grim before the really hard stuff comes on. Kind of like starting with a good champagne for some classy fizz and ending with a double Armagnac for an elegant kick in the head (or, in the case of True Blood, starting with a light beer and ending with a moonshine-backed boilermaker). That’s one heady combination, and not for kids or sissies.

It would be a real treat for viewers otherwise surrounded by mindless fare for hormonal teenage boys if Kings were to continue on cable, which (other than PBS) is where the ambitious quality programming seems to be right now. Some cable-exec genius should snap up the series while the excellent cast is still available – and before one of his competitors gets wise and grabs it instead.