Kings

I finally got around to watching the 13 episodes of Kings, an NBC TV series that flamed out and died rather quickly. Because it was abundantly clear that it was headed for cancellation after just four episodes, I didn't expect much, and was pleasantly surprised.

The show is based on the biblical story of King David but set in a modern world. It might be best to characterize it as an alternate reality or even fantasy/sci-fi. It's not unlike the modern day film adaptations of Shakespeare such as Romeo + Juliet (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) and Hamlet (with Ethan Hawke).

The names are changed, but most of the characters are taken straight out of the biblical narrative. The plot is more or less faithful to the bible broadly speaking, but also departs from it at numerous points.

All in all it's a well done melodrama. Ian McShane does a magnificent job portraying King Saul/Silas. The show tries really hard to make Silas/Saul as sympathetic as possible within certain dramatic restrictions. There are a number of very touching scenes between David and Silas, that would have held tremendous dramatic potential in later seasons if the series had continued. The tragic dimension of Saul's/Silas' fall is really well portrayed. Of course, they had a very fine model in Shakespeare's Macbeth upon which to draw.

It's a real shame that the show didn't survive, but the ratings were simply horrible, and it's difficult to figure out why. It's vastly superior to most of what passes for entertainment on TV nowadays. It's not as good as other short-lived TV series like Wonderfalls and Firefly, but it was pretty damn good.

Michael Green, the creator of the show, speculates that not promoting it among religious groups was a mistake. In fact, the marketers deliberately avoided making reference to the religious inspiration for the show. However, the rationale of the marketers is easy enough to figure out once you've seen the series. The bottom line is that the show itself isn't particularly "religious" (as non-religious people would say it).

The characters in the show basically assume modern mores, rather than religious ones. The ethos of the world that the show creates is basically non-religious; or perhaps a better way to put it is that it's religious in a way that non-religious people imagine religious belief should and does look like. There's a lot of mention of God and miraculous signs, but there's no real depth to the treatment of religious themes.

In short, the marketers quite clearly didn't want to scare off the obvious target audience of the show which was primarily (perhaps surprisingly) non-religious.

In the end, it appears that the marketers of the show felt that the show wasn't likely to garner much of an audience among devout believers of either the Jewish or Christian faith. It's probably true, and no less a shame for it.

Green also speculates that the marketers were afraid of backlash from religious groups because of some of the plot elements in the show. I don't actually believe this can be true, because it's unbelievably stupid. Controversy almost always sells.

It's true that there's some typical Hollywood politically correct silliness woven into the plot that would probably offend some religious sensibilities but the marketers should have deliberately tried to stoke controversy, particularly when they realized that the ratings were as bad as they initially were.

After all, bad publicity is better than no publicity. As it is, the show, which cost in the neighborhood of $50M to produce the 13 episodes, died an ignominious death anyways. What did they have to lose?