All Hail ‘Kings’: 6 Reasons to Revisit the One-Season Wonder
Kings had an all-too-brief reign on NBC, canceled after just 13 episodes. At the time, the network executives who had championed the show were getting pushed out, the new guard was unwilling or unsure of how to promote the show properly, and network TV itself was struggling to stay relevant. Ultimately, Kings aired for just six episodes before getting dethroned from its Sunday night time slot and then exiled to summer for the rest of its run.
Adding insult to royal injury, Kings isn’t even streaming anywhere these days, a decade and a half later. However, the “complete series” — i.e. the complete first season — is available on DVD. With the show’s 15th anniversary falling on March 15, allow us to make a case for a first (or repeat) viewing.
The premise
Created by Michael Green — a screenwriter behind Logan, Blade Runner 2049, the recent Hercule Poirot trilogy, and the upcoming Blade film — Kings told a modern-day David-versus-Goliath tale set in the fictional kingdom of Gilboa.
As the story starts, a young soldier named David (played by Dominion’s Christopher Egan) returns home a hero in Gilboa’s war against neighboring Gath after facing down one of Gath’s Goliath-class tanks and rescuing his nation’s prince.
David is then brought to the capital city of Shiloh, where he becomes a political pawn for King Silas (Deadwood’s Ian McShane). But it’s a hold-your-friends-close-and-enemies-closer situation, since Silas is losing his belief that he was divinely anointed to be Gilboa’s monarch and is starting to think David is the chosen one.
The world-building
As the season progressed, characters on screen referenced Gilboa’s history — how the kingdom, for example, had conquered the nations of Carmel and Selah in the Unification War under then-General Silas’ command, decades before the Gilboa–Gath conflict began. But viewers also learned about Gilboa’s geography, climate, economy, culture, media, sports, and even cuisine.
The series regulars
Joining McShane and Egan in Kings was an all-star cast of series regulars. Arrow’s Susanna Thompson played the politically-savvy Queen Rose. Sebastian Stan (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) and Allison Miller (A Million Little Things) played Silas and Rose’s children, Prince Jack and Princess Michelle. Chicago Fire’s Eamonn Walker played Reverend Ephram Samuels, spiritual advisor to the king. Dylan Baker (The Good Wife) played William, Rose’s industrialist brother. And Wes Studi (Penny Dreadful) played Abner, head of Gilboa’s military.
Andrew Ecches/NBC/Courtesy: Everett Collection
The guest stars
Other familiar faces populated Gilboa, too. Becky Ann Baker (Girls) played David’s mother; Sarita Choudhury (And Just Like That…) played Silas’ mistress; Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone) played William’s exiled nephew’ Leslie Bibb (Iron Man) played Minister of Information Katrina Ghent; and Marlyne Barrett (Chicago Med) played palace secretary Thomasina. Plus, Brian Cox — now famous for his Golden Globe-winning performance on Succession — played Vesper Abbadon, the imprisoned ex-ruler of Carmel.
Eric Liebowitz/NBC/Courtesy: Everett Collection
The production design
With Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) as the pilot director and Kalina Ivanov (Lovecraft Country) as the show’s production designer, Kings built a fictional kingdom atop the real-world streets of New York City. The metropolis played the capital city of Shiloh, and locations elsewhere in the region filled in other Gilboa settings.
“We were trying to create a city where you could believe a monarchy existed,” Green told The New York Times. “It needed the gravitas and the magic that New York brings to it.”
Eric Liebowitz/NBC/Courtesy: Everett Collection
And so the Appel Room of Midtown’s Time Warner Center — one of the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s venues — doubled as Kings’ governmental center, Unity Hall. The Apthorp building of the Upper West Side became the royal palace, and the castle-like Hempstead House on Long Island served as the Silas’ vineyard.
Crew members even made NYC into a battleground for the Kings’ war scenes, driving actual tanks down the avenues of Brooklyn and digging trenches at a construction site in Queens.
The writing
Green and other Kings writers gave the characters poetic and even Shakespearean dialogue, with McShane in particular getting the kind of monologues you’d expect to see on premium cable, not broadcast.
Add to the mix even more Biblical allusions, power plays over peace negotiations and domestic policies, potential divine meddling (heralded by swarms of butterflies), a season-ending coup d’état, and a one-off appearance by an angel of death (Saffron Burrows), and you have a TV show arguably too complex and ambitious for network TV.
It was a risk, and the cast, creatives, and executives behind Kings knew it, as they reflected in a 2023 oral history of the show for Vulture. Katherine Pope, who championed the show during her time as NBCUniversal TV president, said, “A lot of the feedback I heard on this show was ‘It’s too good’; ‘It’s too smart’; ‘Why do you have to make these shows? They’re so confusing!’”
Added McShane, “I know what Michael was trying to do: Michael was trying to make a bit of art, you know. In the face of network TV, you’re trying to create a little art every week. Nothing wrong in that.”
