One Season Wonders: NBC’s Star-Studded Kings Was Too Holy for This Sanctimonious World

In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine. 

I’m not a religious guy, and it’s hard sometimes. Even the spectrum terminology that has been invented to describe folks like me rubs me the wrong way: I’m not a “none,” because there is no way to opt out of having an opinion on faith in this overzealous, under-read country of ours. “Atheist-agnostic” implies that I have any doubts about where I’m headed—reader, I do not. Universalism is too comforting. Richard Dawkins is too much of a miserable transphobe.

What am I to do with my passing interest in the Bible then? There is so much noise in the room that you can’t possibly just sit quietly and engage with the text. (Please do not reach out to me with offers to help.)

Kings, the hour-long drama that lived 13 glorious episodes on NBC in 2009 before dying, is not a big enough ark to hold all of this baggage. You need to be some kind of naif, in the year Barack Obama first took office, to look out upon Christendom and say to yourself, “What these people need during primetime is a modern retelling of parts of 1 Samuel and other bits of the Old Testament, complete with place-names and monikers that basically map one-to-one on the war-torn Middle East, yet which seems to be set in Toronto.” (It claims, dubiously, to have been filmed in New York.) It is a show that is trying to do so much, more than a network drama in this benighted country should dare. But that is why I was fascinated by it. Hubris is bad for the arrogant, but for the bystander, it’s always something to watch.

The Show

It is the modern age in the new kingdom of Gilboa (that’s a mountain in Israel, which, as I say, this looks nothing like). They have been at war for a generation with the neighboring republic of Gath (in real life: a city that was part of the Philistine confederation during ancient times, and which, again, once existed here in the real world in a place where there are much larger issues than canceled TV shows). Gilboa’s absolute monarchy is ruled by King Silas (Ian McShane in full bombastic splendor), who manages a kingdom in the information age as opposed to the Iron Age.

Silas’ legitimacy rests on two things: first, he fought Gath to a stalemate and founded the shining city of Shiloh (again, this is a city that was located in what is now the modern day West Bank). Second, he enjoys the blessing of Reverend Samuels (no-nonsense character actor Eamonn Walker), whose favor Silas is always at some risk of losing.

As the show begins, Shiloh is being inaugurated after a war that took the life of the father of a humble farm boy, David (Christopher Egan, known to many as the eponymous hero in Eragon). Samuels encounters David by happenstance on his way to the inauguration and sees something in the young man’s knack for fixing things. Jump ahead two years, and David is on the front lines of the war with Gath. Going against orders, he stands up to one of Gath’s Goliath tanks, rescuing a contingent of P.O.W.s who happen to include Silas’ son, Jack (Sebastian Stan, laying the groundwork for his career being a soldier who angrily plays second fiddle to the blond hero). David is rewarded for his bravery with celebrity and entree into Silas’ court, where he crushes on Silas’ daughter Michelle (Allison Miller) and tries to survive royal intrigue, as Jack and Silas’ wife Rose (Susanna Thompson) scheme to eliminate him as a threat. The cast is rounded out by the kind of absolute ringers that signaled NBC was serious about this one: Wes Studi plays Silas’ top general, Dylan Baker his brother-in-law and the military-industrial money man behind his fledgling kingdom (more on that in a minute), and Macaulay Culkin showed up for the first time in a while as Baker’s son, formerly exiled by Silas for reasons that, as far as I can tell, are unspecified. The fragile peace negotiations with Gath hang in the balance from episode to episode, and so the premier of Gath (Mark Margolis) and his number two, played by Miguel Ferrer, are recurring antagonists.

And, of course, there is Brian Cox, the former ruler whom Silas has deposed and now secretly imprisons, occasionally seeking his fork-tongued advice. It has to be a callback to Cox’s role as Hannibal Lecter in the somewhat obscure 1986 adaptation of Red Dragon, titled Manhunter. It was a lot of star power to bring to bear on a show that ultimately went nowhere.

It’s interesting what the show keeps from the Bible and what it discards or changes: Stan’s Prince Jack is clearly the analog to the biblical Jonathan, a character people have long-interpreted as having romantic overtones with the biblical David. In this version, Jack is a closeted gay man, and it’s handled very questionably: he’s unstable, sinister and scheming, and Silas tortures him with marriage to a woman as punishment for a failed coup in the show’s closing episodes. Silas, as the analog to Saul, does see David as a threat and David does clash and cooperate with him, ultimately remaining faithful to him because, David believes, God has appointed him. The show’s promise right in the title is that this is going to lead up to a retelling of the events of the biblical book of Kings, and the place-names and incidents that occur clearly point toward the eventual birth and rise of a Solomon character. You figure the capstone to the show is probably supposed to be Solomon’s rebuilding of the temple.

Beyond that long-term promise, there are all sorts of other little flourishes, too: Jason Antoon and Joel Marsh Garland play a pair of chucklehead palace guards who read like the minor players in a Shakespeare production—they are the chorus and, occasionally, the un-asked-for helpers in the other players’ times of great need. In one memorable bit, they are tasked with flushing birds out of an alcove and spend the entire episode failing to do so until, miraculously, they manage it at the exact moment the flock will obscure a sniper’s vantage point. It’s a show that operates from the standpoint that there is a hand of fate guiding actions, favoring some characters and cursing others.

So why did it get canceled?

There are many reasons this one couldn’t make it up the mountain. To start with: for the show’s premise to work, you can’t stare at it too long. I’m sure you can find a country somewhere on 21st century Earth that is still an absolute monarchy, just like you can find ones without universal health care or easy personal electronic bank transfer, but there are nonetheless so many reasons that the modern world order no longer is dictated by that mode of governance. A fun game would be to line 10 historians up 100 weapon-strewn meters from a microphone, ask them to explain this, and then take bets on how many would survive the battle royale to give the lecture. The lucky survivor might start with, say, the existence of both a military-industrial complex and a 24-hour sensationalist satellite news network (both of which are plot elements in this show).

Secondly, and perhaps most glaringly, is that the show rests on a biblical worldview but will not actually look at the world’s religion. Is it Christianity? Is it Judaism? Whatever it is, it holds sway over political hegemony in the nation of Gilboa. Do these same place-names occur in this holy text? Is a Goliath tank named after the giant Goliath? The whole point of the biblical Saul’s monarchy was that he replaced the judges, but it seems like Silas just replaced a worse king in Cox. If none of that is going on—if we are not, strictly speaking, interested in a temple—what’s there for an eventual Solomon to do?

If you are this kind of nitpicker, do not bother with Kings. It demands that you remove yourself a step from this world and view it as allegory. The thing is, though, that this works extremely well at the times when it’s really working: The cast is phenomenal, and they’re working in service of a show that is, on some level, trying to view this tale with modern sensibilities. Silas condemns Jack’s homosexuality, but he never rejects the validity of it (what a progressive guy!).

Silas goes into how he believes in evolution as an instrument of the creator. As he wanders, fretting over an ailing illegitimate son, he runs over a deer, and bitterly asks God if seeing a beautiful thing die is the price he’s being asked to pay before mercy killing the creature.

This is awesome stuff for me, a guy who treats the existence of a deity who intervenes in our lives as an interesting premise for a show. I imagine it probably offended one big demographic of people and possibly made an even larger one feel too uncomfortable to give it the benefit of the doubt when there was other stuff on in the same time slot. It cannot have been cheap, either, to pull in that roster of actors, even if most of the rest of the production values center around hanging up themed drapery. And maybe that’s why it never blossomed—too hung up on its ornate ambition to truly consider its grander purpose. 

Best Episodes

Kings runs more on the power of its premise and performances than anything having to do with its plot, and it’s hard to point to episodes that stand out as being particularly stronger or weaker than others. That said, the two-part pilot “Goliath,” “First Night,” and the two-part finale “The New King” are where the show’s peaks noticeably transcend its valleys.

Shows to soothe the pain

For some wonderful Ian McShane scheming in a religious context, The Pillars of the Earth casts him as a 12th century power player within an English diocese. So much the better if it gets you to read Ken Follett’s riveting book.

For a show that promotes McShane to an actual god, American Gods has you covered. (And also makes for a great excuse to get into Neil Gaiman’s novel.)

If Christopher Egan’s jawline is like manna in the desert for you, the short-lived angels-and-demons show Dominion might get you through your wanderings. With two seasons (and the fact I literally never heard of it before writing this), it does not qualify for this monthly feature.

Tune in next month as we skate the edge with Aeon Flux.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

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