Kings: In Memoriam

Technically, Kings has not been cancelled, per se. NBC simply declined to order a second season.

But there’s no need to stand on principle here. We all know how it works. Kings has been dead in the water ever since they stopped airing it on Saturdays. Or maybe it was the move from Sunday to Saturday in the first place that did it. Although, to be totally honest, Kings hasn’t stood a chance ever since those awful series premiere ratings came in. Which was itself probably due to NBC’s failure to adequately promote the show. Or it might have been because the show was too unusual conceptually to make it easy to promote. These things, they go in circles.

But regardless of where the blame lies, it’s very sad that Kings will soon be no more, because it was (and still is) an excellent show. And, perhaps more importantly, it was a show that wanted so badly to succeed. It was the Hillary Clinton of network dramas, capping off that multi-million-dollar two-hour pilot with its title character striding across that metaphorical-on-at-least-three-levels battlefield, a blood-stained sheet in his hand, crying out (to paraphrase) “Look at me! Vote for me! I might not be everything you want right now but gosh darn it I WILL DO ANYTHING IT TAKES TO MAKE YOU LOVE ME.”

And it worked. On me, if no one else. I was hooked from the opening scenes. From the premise, really.

Kings, created by Heroes writer Michael Green, is set in an alternate universe, in the New York-like capital of a United States-like nation, where the biblical story of Kings Saul and David is currently being played out. And maybe that was the problem right there. How many of us really know King David’s story well enough to follow a retelling? I logged countless hours in Sunday school over the years, but even so, aside from the Goliath thing and the are-they-or-aren’t-they deal with David and Jonathan (which was never mentioned in my Sunday school classes, oddly enough), I found myself having to spend quite a bit of time scrolling through verses from 1 Samuel on my favorite online Bible site in order to really follow Kings’ allegory. And I realize that not everyone is into having to reread the King James in order to properly enjoy their primetime soaps. Plus, apparently, the NBC promo people didn’t want anyone to know that the show was about the biblical King David. Which is interesting, since the show is called Kings, the protagonist is named David, and the pilot episode is titled “Goliath.” You don’t have to be up on your Bible Studies coursework to get that particular reference.

And now, for whatever reason, the show’s no more. It was moved from Thursday to Sunday, then from Sunday to Saturday, then from Saturdays in spring to Saturdays in summer. The burnoff of the seven remaining episodes will commence this weekend. Pickup by another network seems highly unlikely, so we can only hope that Kings will have a long life on DVD – and that there are promising new writers out there watching Kings and taking notes for their own conceptually groundbreaking pilots.

Or we could just give up and watch Southland.

(Whenever I start to think about this too much, it takes all my willpower to keep me from going off on a My So-Called Life rant. (Well, my willpower and the fact that what happened there was more likely Claire Danes’ fault. All those angry letters I sent off to ABC when I was 15, and for what? For the friggin’ Mod Squad? You hurt me, Danes, you really hurt me.) (And also, while Kings is undoubtedly an excellent show, MSCL it is not.))

Anyway. Warning: Spoilers for Kings‘ first six episodes follow.

As aforementioned, the show is allegorical, and most of the characters have direct biblical parallels. The main character in the first (and only) season is King Silas. He’s our biblical King Saul – you know, the guy God used to be behind before he decided he liked David better. Silas has a wife, a son, and a daughter, and the four of them are the royal family of our alternate reality nation of Gilboa. They’re an odd mix of biblical-style rulers (the crown prince is a military officer who’s actually sent into hardcore battle situations), mid-twentieth-century-style dictators (Silas will hear petitions from the common folk, if he feels like it and/or he thinks it’ll be good PR, but his decisions are law so don’t mess with him), and twenty-first-century-style British royalty (the paparazzi happily reports on every nightclub opening the prince and princess make their way to). Meanwhile, we have a prophet-type-dude, an African-American (uh, African-Gilboan?) pastor who parallels the prophet Samuel. And then of course we have David Shepherd (seriously, that’s the character’s name), a lowly soldier who’s been implicitly chosen by God and/or Reverend Samuels to succeed Silas in ruling the kingdom. About which Silas, and everyone else, has understandably mixed feelings.

The show stars a bunch of people no one’s ever heard of and Ian McShane, who starred on the “beloved and critically acclaimed HBO series Deadwood,”  as it has been referred to every time I have ever seen it mentioned, although I don’t know anyone who has ever seen an episode of Deadwood. The Kings cast is universally quite good, although I’ve never been particularly overwhelmed by any of them except McShane and occasionally Marlyne Afflack, who plays Thomasina, King Silas’ valet/bodyguard/all-around-kick-ass-chick-sidekick. But that’s partly because Kings is one of those shows where the writing and directing take center stage. It’s a show that has gorgeous sets and lots of symbolic CGI butterflies, and where divine intervention is a frequent plot device.

And really, I’m surprised that the alternate universe itself wasn’t enough to draw more people into the show. Gilboa has paparazzi, but it also has unilateral government censorship (the result: only the tabloid stories about the royal family that King Silas wants to get out there get published. So the gay Prince Jack is still successfully closeted, but when David hooks up with a girl who isn’t his biblically-intended Princess Michelle, the whole world sees it on the front page the next morning. And when the TV anchors refer to Silas as “a king beloved by his people,” you honestly don’t know if she’s telling the truth or if she’s reading from a script written by Silas himself. Or both.) In Gilboa, there are churches, and clergy, and much is made of God, but no religion is specifically named, and certainly no alternative religions are referenced. Race and gender aren’t discussed, but the country’s real leaders are all white men. And there are all these mysterious evil yet multi-dimensional corporate dudes lurking around in the background.

And yet, with all this going on, it’s still an effective soap opera. The characters are compelling enough, and the stories just over-the-top enough, to keep you hooked. There’s the heartbreaking saga of Silas and his mistress and illegitimate son, whom he abandoned after making a deal with God (or so he thinks). There’s the bizarre Jack-wants-to-rule-the-world-except-Jack-is-way-too-lame-to-pull-it-off-so-instead-he-just-drinks-a-lot subplot, which seems to settle the were-they-or-weren’t-they David/Jonathan question (David is apparently straight; Jack/Jonathan is gay, but not interested in David, at least not yet – and, since there are only seven episodes left, I’m guessing not ever). People keep telling Jack he can’t be king and be gay, too, so Jack responds by dumping his boyfriend and beating up some other dude, only to start hooking up with his driver, because hey, what do you do. And then in the last episode before the hiatus we found out that Jack and Michelle are twins, and she’s four minutes older, but she can’t have kids and/or is promised to someone else, and Jack is afraid David and Michelle will get married and become king and queen and Jack will be left crying into his appletini. Or something like that. And then there’s the intense love/hate/competition/respect/etc. thing between David and Silas (and between most of the characters, when you get down to it – Silas and Queen Rose, David and Jack, Jack and Michelle…)

Conceptually, Kings has been compared to Battlestar Galactica, which I never saw, and The Tudors, which I think is unfair and circumstantial. But it’s always made me think most of The West Wing.  And sometimes the parallels to King David feel less applicable than the parallels to Barack Obama.

It sucks, but it’s a fact of life that some “unusual” network shows succeed and others fail. Lost took off and became huge, and I’m still not sure why but I’d like to think it was Dominic Monaghan’s doing. Arrested Development hung on longer than seemed possible, and its successor 30 Rock was gasping for air until Sarah Palin, of all people, resuscitated it. Friday Night Lights just got renewed for two additional seasons for reasons that are unclear to me. Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared each had a single short season and was gone, even though Judd Apatow is now our universally acknowledged Comedy God. And Pushing Daisies made it for a while there, just barely, only to get killed by the writers’ strike. Meanwhile, they’re airing not one but two seasons of So You Think You Can Dance this year.

But Kings on NBC? Not so much. Hey, Michael Green, maybe you can see if AMC is interested. Or, at the very least, I bet Matthew Weiner is hiring. Good luck. And in the meantime, please give us some cool DVD extras, okay?

Kings returns to NBC on June 13, 2009

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Andrew Eccles, Eric Liebowitz