SPORT OF KINGS
by Daren Foster

***Like olde tyme royalty, NBC's Kings faces execution.***

Kings is (nearly) dead. Long live Kings!

You’d think that after almost half a century of practically uninterrupted television watching -- my motto’s always been: Neither school nor pain of grounding nor heat of a bright summer’s day will keep this viewer from being in front of the TV screen -- I might’ve learned not to get much attached to anything that the boob tube offers up. At least, anything of substance or quality or that smacks even slightly of being off the beaten track. Best to just invest my affections into that which slowly but inevitably will suck out my very soul. Embrace the banality for it will never abandon you.

Yet there I was, the naïf TV viewer in me, looking to program up the latest episode of NBC’s Kings in its regular Sunday night slot only to find that it had been nudged aside by an expanded hour of Dateline NBC. Yeah, you read that right. An expanded hour of Dateline NBC. As if the world needs more news about the trials and tribulations of becoming a supermodel. Aren’t there reality shows out there covering that terrain? If you’re going to put more news and information on your primetime schedule, shouldn’t it be news and information not trashy voyeuristic gossip pieces about knuckleheads who pay thousands of dollars to put their pre-pubescent daughters through dubiously accredited modeling schools in the hopes of raising frighteningly anorexic, cocaine snorting, see-through spokespeople who promote impossibly high, unachievable expectations among the already fatally wounded consumer society?

I’m just asking.

A press release accompanying the programming change stated that the critically acknowledged but ratings challenged Kings would be moved to a Saturday night slot where it would play out the season’s final 8 episodes. And by “season’s”, the network actually means “series” because once a show is moved to Saturdays, it ain’t ever coming back. You see, unless a TV program features toothless, tattooed hillbillies running from the law or steroid enhanced circus freaks calling themselves professional wrestlers, airing on a Saturday night either means you have long since been dead or are sitting on its doorstep, waiting for the axe to fall. Everyone involved in a TV program that’s part of a network’s Saturday night line-up is busy circulating their CVs.

It’s a funny concept, this idea of television networks having a particular evening in which they don’t even bother trying to entice audiences to watch their programs. What sort of business model is that? Yeah well, there’s lots of competition out there, you know? We’ve tried getting them to watch on Saturdays. They used to watch on Saturdays but lately.. not so much. You know, there are the movies, video games, DVDs. Our research shows that people just aren’t that excited about watching garbage on their TVs on Saturday nights anymore. What are you going to do? We’re just giving the people what they want. Focus groups will be focused to prove as much.

An argument could be made that by moving it to the graveyard.. er, a less competitive spot than on Sundays where networks pile up their popular shows, Kings will have the opportunity to generate more of a following. (Begging the question why the networks do that in the first place. Fact is, aside from Sunday and Thursday nights, it’s a desert landscape throughout the rest of the week. Why not spread the wealth around a little bit? Lure viewers in front of their TVs on, say, a Friday night with something that doesn’t insult their intelligence and/or offend their sensibilities). But by moving Kings to Saturday nights, what’s going to ultimately happen is that NBC won’t promote the show and when the first salacious bit of newsy bit of infotainment occurs that can’t be fit into the expanded Sunday Dateline NBC, it will breach the levy of Saturday night, pre-empting Kings for a very important Dateline NBC Saturday episode. I’m going to hazard a guess here and now that very few of the final 8 episodes of Kings will ever see air and if they do, it will come late in August during the dog days of summer.

Despite all my carping and protestations over the show’s unfair treatment, Kings is in no way an unqualified triumph. I slogged through its 2 hour premiere, contentedly chopping up vegetables for a stir fry in order to keep me fully engaged. Arguably, there was too much going on, too much exposition rather than a slower rolling out of the unfamiliar world that makes up Kings. A modern variation of the Old Testament King David story, the plot was thick with various strands of intrigue and spoke in a language that rang in a Shakespearean-biblical cross; like Deadwood but without any traces of cocksucker. If ever a show needed time for a deliberate and measured unfolding, it was Kings. But, given the networks’ itchy trigger fingers, one borders on the delusional to hope for such things.

While I hesitate to dwell on a Deadwood comparison for too long, it’s difficult not to with the presence of Ian McShane in both shows. The late lamented HBO western’s charismatically diabolical, Al Swearengen, McShane plays King Silas in Kings and is no less charismatic or diabolical but is far less expletive prone. He is a warrior-king with a very likely corrupt route to the throne and an equally shady personal past. Silas rules his kingdom of Shiloh with equal measures of tyranny and judicious use of unfettered power. Waging war in hopes of securing a lasting peace, Silas is a full blown conflicted character and McShane pulls off the dichotomy with a magnetic and compelling charm.

Similarities between the two shows stop there. While Kings started to show signs of smarts and original personality after the first episode, it still stops well short of Deadwood’s depth and complexity. In fact, one of the reasons I’ve been drawn into the show’s spell is the vaguely disturbing political and religious undercurrents that have manifested themselves so far. No matter how hard you flip up and down the channels on TV, it is darn near impossible to find a series that so overtly accentuates the positive of living in an absolute and sometimes despotic monarchy. It cuts against the democratic grain that we’ve been brought up in. And god in Kings is most definitely spelled with a capital ‘G’ and He (He is absolutely a He in Kings) has shown traits of being a smiting, vengeful God and is most certainly a significant player on the scene. Again, not a sentiment you see very often in our godless, secular media age.

Kings is an interesting beast and has my nod as the most original network hour long series out there at the moment. Like all strange children that hopefully aren’t actually sociopathic, it deserves time to sort out its idiosyncrasies and find its way in the world. Being moved after 4 episodes to Saturday night, however, does not bode well for its future. It reveals, once more, the networks as the craven entities that they truly are and well deserving of the unhappy fate they seem to be fully embracing. To use TV lingo, it’s a slow death by Saturday nights.