#christopher egan

“We were going to make this show that everybody was going to talk about,” says Katherine Pope, the former president of NBC Universal TV Studios. Photo NBC

The 2009 NBC series Kings was meant to be a bold swing — a just-weird-enough-to-work biblical epic that could appeal to both religious audiences and agnostic, liberal viewers. Set in the 21st century, it told the story of the rise of King David in an alternate-universe version of New York City, where battles are fought with tanks and computer screens and palaces are filled with designer suits and cell phones. The main characters — King Silas; his eventual usurper, David; and the various court members and family hangers-on who swarm around them — were engaged in a power struggle for control of the fictional kingdom of Gilboa, their respective levels of divine influence charted in the show’s penchant for decadent symbolism: butterfly crowns, crosses made from shadows and light, ghostly visitations from the Angel of Death. For viewers accustomed to more conventional workplace or family dramas, Kings stood out: Its sets were grander (there were actual tanks), its story lines more peculiar (Brian Cox played a deposed king hidden in a basement), and its humor more idiosyncratic (its royal brats believe “velvet ropes unhook like bra straps”).

Kings arrived at a moment when NBC and the other networks saw their cultural status slipping in favor of attention-grabbing cable programming. In 2008, ABC was still hanging on to the difficult to explain yet popular and critically lauded genre hit Lost, but CBS was floating along on a reliable bedrock of crime procedurals and sitcoms. Meanwhile, shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, True Blood, The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad had made HBO, FX, and AMC the new loci of exciting TV drama. A show like Kings was an unquestionably risky investment, requiring a huge production budget (reportedly $12 million for the pilot alone) and a careful marketing strategy that could speak to a precise yet expansive target audience. But it represented the kind of risk worth taking, a show that could give NBC a renewed sheen of prestige and critical acclaim. A show that could fill an ER-size hole in the network’s Thursday-night programming — or else fail miserably trying.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that between the moment when its pilot was green-lit and the day when that pilot actually premiered, Kings transformed from a future NBC darling to an untouchable hot potato on the programming grid. The first episode aired on a Sunday. Although HBO began staking out Sunday nights in 1999 when The Sopranos premiered, network TV was operating on a system in which weeknights were still the priority and strong, prime-time lead-in programming was seen as a fundamental boost for new shows. (it had lost the coveted weekday slot by then) and was seen by a paltry 6 million viewers, sparking rumors that NBC underpromoted the show and intended to cancel it. Still, some critics praised Kings.

David “feels like an unexpected breath of fresh air among the more angst-ridden protagonists of the small screen,” Heather Havrilesky wrote for Salon. “As the world looks poised to sink into economic and spiritual quicksand of its own making, this is the hero we’re in the mood for.” The network subsequently aired three tightly written and indulgently rendered episodes, featuring the likes of Ian McShane, Sebastian Stan, Sarita Choudhury, Brian Cox, Eamonn Walker, Dylan and Becky Ann Baker, Leslie Bibb, and more, before demoting the rest of the season (including the arrival of guest star Macaulay Culkin) to Saturday nights. When it was finally canceled, NBC’s president of prime-time entertainment, Angela Bromstad, said, “It doesn’t mean we’re not looking for big ideas, [but] they have to be big ideas the audience can grab on to.”

Indeed, Kings was not the last eccentric drama on network TV — incredibly, NBC would produce Hannibal in 2013. But in retrospect, Kings was a turning point, a moment when the trajectories of network and cable ambitions diverged, when the former became the home of safe, familiar formats, while exciting, groundbreaking, dramas were ceded to the latter and, eventually, to streaming. More than a decade later, network dramas have yet to gain the cultural ground Kings was designed to hold, even as the certainty of streaming strategies has begun to fade. The story behind Kings — how it came to be, why NBC decided to bet its fortunes on it, and why that gamble never paid off — yields the kinds of observations you might have watching the show itself: It’s hard to hold on to a throne. But it’s even harder to get that throne back once you’ve lost it.

I. And God said, "Let there be bird crap."

II. All Hail the New York City Tax Credit

III. Casting the Court

IV. How Much Faith Do You Need?

V. The New York Public Library and Whitefish Salad

VI. The Locusts Descend

VII. Jeff Zucker Brings the Darkness

VIII. Wrong Place, Wrong Time

(I'm saving this article to tumblr because I would hate to have Vulture delete it and it be lost forever. Some of the pics are already gone. I had to track them down with The Wayback Machine. I love Kings and this article answers most of my questions about why it was cancelled.)