When production of Kings was announced a few months back, I got irrationally excited. Not only did it promise to be a showcase for the gifted Ian McShane, generally ill-used since his unforgettable turn in Deadwood, but its premise is the sort of batshit-crazy idea that can make for appealing television. Essentially a fantastic modern-day retelling of the story of David and King Saul – with McShane in the role of Saul – Kings has potential coming off it in waves. Why? Well, McShane’s prodigious talents aside, David is one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible, a morally compromised figure whose wisdom and grace was offset by terrible ambition and murderous abuse of power, and who only got away with his often reprehensible behavior because God happened to like him. What’s more, his relationship with King Saul was, to put it mildly, dysfunctional. The power-mad Saul, threatened by the young and handsome David, went from being a respected servant of Jehovah to a near-psychopath who would do anything to rid himself of the man he once thought of as a son.
Then again, as promising as the series seemed because of its primary actor and source material, there were plenty of ways to fuck it up. For one thing, Kings’ status as a network show would rob him of the delicate range of expression McShane displayed as Al Swearengen. For another, the creative team – largely creator Michael Green along with Francis Lawrence and Erik Oleson – have an awfully spotty record, having worked on ambitious but flawed projects like Jack & Bobby, well-meaning messes like Heroes, and dismal fare like Everwood. And while McShane alone, especially in a role as meaty as King Saul, is reason enough to give the show a chance – along with some promising names lower in the credits, like the amazing return of Macauly Culkin – the romantic leads are played by bland Australian Christopher Egan and unknown quality Allison Miller. The trailers, in addition, were pretty terrible, making what should be a crazed Biblical drama look like a bad WB teen soap.
So, which way will the show go? Will it be an engagingly strange retelling of one of the Bible’s most notoriously weird relationships, or will it just be a tarted-up rich-kid romance? Green has said he intends to make the story as true to the Bible as possible, while staying in the framework of a soap opera and tailoring it to network demands. Let’s you and me watch the two-hour pilot and find out together.
The pilot starts out with popular King Silas Benjamin (so much for Saul) meeting with his high council to plan a speech before his subjects. The occasion is the full restoration of the capital city of Shiloh, in what appears to be a fictionalized America known as Gilboa — lower Manhattan reimagined as a latter-day technocracy ruled by an absolute monarch. Early on, we see one of the things that I liked the most about Kings — it has a real sense of religious wonder and revelation, but never comes across as preachy or moralistic in the way that most shows along the lines of Seventh Heaven always go for. It's religious in a Biblical sense; King Silas is a man to whom God is a daily presence in his life, not a remote abstraction. This point of view isn't always popular with his advisors; his high priest, played beautifully by Eamonn Walker, reminds him that he serves at God's indulgence, while his family — slickly professional Queen Rose (Susanna Thompson) and brother-in-law/corporate honcho WIlliam Cross (a somewhat thankless role for outstanding character actor Dylan Baker), wonder if he's "doing the God thing" in his speech, pointing out that God isn't any too popular with the public these days.
McShane — who is absolutely fantastic in every scene he's in, getting opportunities to stretch that he wasn't given by his character on Deadwood, and sinking his teeth into the enjoyably highfalutin dialogue many of the show's key scenes are written in — does indeed do the God thing, infusing the story of his coronation (a running gag is that he's constantly telling his court historian exactly how to write up various current events) with a nicely displayed sense of religious terror. I'm not religious in the least, but it's nice to see a show that treats the existence of God as neither a joke or a moral bludgeon, and McShane plays the whole thing nicely — King Silas' belief in the divine right of kings serves him as inspiration and confidence-builder as well as subtle threat. After all, if you oppose the king's wishes, you oppose the very will of God himself. The scene also serves to introduce one of the show's ongoing visual metaphors, as McShane describes his anointing by God with a crown of butterflies — a symbol that will come back to haunt him by the end of the pilot. His speech, drawn straight from the bible, shows how the most high-toned religious jibber-habber can seem powerful coming from the mouth of a charismatic figure.
We first meet star Christopher Egan (as David Shepherd — no doubt he has an older brother Jack who's a spinal surgeon) in his impossibly idyllic family farmhouse during a chance meeting with Walker's Rev. Samuels — and before you know it, we jump ahead two years to see him and his brother having joined the military, and involved in a border impasse with enemy nation Gath. The bad guys capture a company of Gilboan soldiers (including the King's oldest son, the dissipated schemer Jack, nicely played by Sebastian Stan) and hold them hostage to sue for peace; this sets up the show's take on the legendary Bible story of David and Goliath. Frankly, the thing came across as a pretty hokey action sequence to me; the device of making Goliath nothing more than a big tank didn't quite work, and it seems they could have come up with a slightly more clever way of framing it without making it an actual giant human, but since Kings has already been accused by some critics of being too talky, I guess they more or less had to go this route. The upshot, of course, is that David becomes a national hero, is showered with affection by King Silas, attracts the attention of the King's daughter Michelle (a pretty and inoffensive Allison Miller) — and makes himself an enemy to the man he saves, as Jack immediately sizes him up as a rival for the crown.