This caught my eye:
"Kings" is set in the mythical kingdom of Gilboa and its capitol city of Shiloh - a clean, gleaming place. The kingdom itself has just finished a war for its independence, and McShane's King Silas was one of the heroes of that war, hence his current position.
Still, border skirmishes continue with the neighboring nation of Gath, and in one of the skirmishes, the king's son Jack (Sebastian Stan) is taken hostage.
He is rescued by a young farmboy/soldier named David Shepherd (Chris Egan), which makes David a national hero and puts Silas into his debt - a debt Silas repays by placing him in a high-profile government position.
Trouble is, Silas' government is corrupt, amoral and dysfunctional. So is much of his family, including the sullen, conniving, treacherous son that David saved.
The exception is Silas' idealistic daughter, Michelle (Allison Miller).
Naturally, David falls for her, so he chooses to remain in the hornet's nest of Shiloh instead of returning to the farm where he could live as the almost inhumanly pure and virtuous man that deep down inside he really is.
Those qualities make him both different and highly suspect in Shiloh - a status underscored by the way Silas considers making David the successor to the throne at the same time he also contemplates killing him.
Silas isn't going to win any Mr. Congeniality awards. But McShane makes this dark, complex character convincing and utterly fascinating.
Intrigued, a fault of mine, I then went to Variety:
Credit "Kings" creator Michael Green with a bold stroke -- recognizing that the biblical tale of King David, recast in modern dress, contains enough lust, violence and political intrigue to provide the underpinnings for a primetime soap. Viewers will have to survive a rocky, at-times jarring first hour before the series begins coalescing into something interesting -- flawed but unpredictable, with a characteristically intense Ian McShane at its core. Even so the show is a dice roll, which likely explains why NBC rescheduled it to Sundays, where it will take more than slingshots and prayers to ward off the Philistines.
...Set in the mythical kingdom of Gilboa, the series features "Eragon's" Chris Egan as David Shepherd (get it?), a young soldier fighting against neighboring Gath. In an act of courage and desperation, David boldly rescues the king's son, Jack (Sebastian Stan) -- although here by slaying a Goliath tank with the help of a rocket-launcher.
The grateful King Silas (McShane) whisks David back to Gilboa's capital, Shiloh, which somewhat resembles San Francisco (even though the show lensed in New York). Meant to be exploited for public-relations purposes, the war hero quickly finds a place in the king's employ -- much to the envious Jack's displeasure -- and catches the eye of Silas' daughter (Allison Miller).
"Tell me what you want and it's yours," Silas oozes, an offer accompanied by a vague stench of brimstone.
At first it all feels a trifle clunky, from the king's seat of power being modeled after a corporate board room (seriously, would more ambitious costume and production design have broken the bank?) to the underlying plot of one honorable soldier tempted by power and corruption.
The two-hour premiere, however, ends with a whiff of prophecy, and the third hour ratchets up the drama with a fine guest appearance by Brian Cox, parallels to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a growing role for Silas' steely queen (Susanna Thompson), and rising tensions involving the king's grasp on his throne, as he's pushed and pulled at by a religious leader (Eamonn Walker) and his brother-in-law (Dylan Baker).
Finally, seeing McShane back in episodic form -- his voice a low, mesmerizing rumble -- is a welcome treat, even if Silas doesn't approach the ruthlessness achieved by McShane's Al Swearengen back on "Deadwood." By hour four (all of them directed by Francis Lawrence), "Kings" has begun to assume a life of its own, beyond the cutesiness of simply identifying whatever biblical references one can recall from napping through Sunday school.
And this:
Michael Green was walking down a street in Jerusalem in late 2006, when the concept of the new television series “Kings” came into focus.
“The idea had been roiling my brain for a while,” Green said, but now he sat down to write the pilot for “Kings,” while working as writer and co-executive producer for “Heroes.”
“Kings,” which will launch with special two-hour premiere on March 15, takes the biblical drama of young David, Goliath, King Saul and the prophet Samuel and transports it to a contemporary city that looks a lot like a gleaming New York after a thorough scrubbing.
Don’t look for a 21st century swords-and-sandals epic in the NBC series. The political intrigues and corporate power plays have a distinctly Washingtonian ring, and part of the fun is to look for parallels to the last year of President George W. Bush’s administration, the Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, Middle East conflicts and even the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Green, who attended a yeshiva in New York and whose mother is Israeli, is a bit coy about drawing direct biblical-contemporary comparisons.
“It’s not for me to say what the parallels are,” he commented. “That’s up to each viewer.”
However, the Jewish or Christian viewer, who stayed awake in Sunday school, should have no trouble identifying the TV protagonists with their biblical counterparts...
...Green, 36, is a native New Yorker, with close ties to Israel. His mother, born in Tel Aviv, came to the United States after finishing her army service, met Green’s father, and “has visited ever since,” Green said, adding, “Most of my extended family lives in Israel.
He is optimistic that “Kings” will eventually be seen on Israeli and British television, which usually happens after a new series’ second or third season in the United States.
Green reinforced his boyhood yeshiva studies with a more academic perspective when he took a double major in human biology and religious studies at Stanford University.
After college, his interest turned to story writing, rather than religion or biology.
“I once created the character of a doctor in one of my shows," he said, "but never became one myself -- to the disappointment of my parents.”
Sounds like a Zionist plot to me. ;->)
The official site.
A clip.
A long explanation.
And here's the word from the New York Times:
...The story of David works so well as a modern parable of power and corruption that it seems remarkable that there aren’t more biblical adaptations around. So many Shakespeare plays and even Homer’s works have been turned into popular modern-day plays, novels and movies...
It’s harder to find contemporary scripts based on Scripture. Mainstream filmmakers are reluctant to tinker with religious sensibilities...
Yet plenty of Old Testament stories carry temptingly modern (even sitcomy) themes: Ruth, after all, stayed and took care of her Jewish mother-in-law, and Queen Esther was picked by Ahasuerus after winning a beauty contest. (Queen Esther was invoked in the HBO movie “Recount,” when Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), likens her situation in the 2000 election to that of the queen, who, she says, “was willing to sacrifice herself to save the lovely Jewish people.”)
...As Silas’s wife, Queen Rose, Susanna Thompson shows some range as the coolly perfect, daintily Machiavellian first lady of the land. (The Apthorp building serves as the royal residence, and the court convenes in a glass-paneled hall in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.) Silas’s son and heir, Jack (Sebastian Stan), a wastrel prince with a shadowy personal life who is jealous of David, adds some “Dynasty” pizzazz to the story.
David falls for the king’s lovely daughter, Michelle (Allison Miller). According to the Book of Samuel, however, Michal was the first of eight wives. So if NBC plans to keep the script true to the Book of Samuel at the current speed, “Kings” will need many seasons, and perhaps even centuries, to get to Bathsheba.
There are some delicious details. Silas keeps a court biographer at his side who writes the first draft of history by dictation. After a particularly contentious cabinet meeting, Silas turns to his scribe and says, “Write this down: He governed patiently and well and ran home for a shower.”...
But Mr. Egan’s David is a dull hero. At times the boy wonder is presented as an innocent, almost an allegorical figure like Billy Budd. At others, he is given a cocky playfulness that recalls Jack Dawson, the young adventurer played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic.” (“I’d like a large glass of something really expensive,” David says to the bartender at his first royal banquet.) Mostly, those two sides don’t mix, and David remains a pretty but bland presence.
Even the cinematography is uneven. Battle scenes are shot in the grainy, washed-out colors found in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Generation Kill,” but city scenes are as sleek, bright and computer-generated as those on “Heroes.”
The series itself seems divided: at times a supersize fable told with portentous, and even turgid, simplicity, while at others, a sophisticated spoof that uses ancient legend to send up modern politics. And when a series cannot be both, it ends up being neither. That could be another reason that so few movies use biblical stories as a base: it’s a lot harder than it sounds.
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UPDATE
Weekend TV's Loser: Kings, the David-versus-Goliath update from a former executive producer of Heroes. Sunday's two-hour premiere bombed with only 6 million overall viewers, per preliminary Nielsen estimates, and a showing among 18- to 49-year-olds that was so barely there that the Morley Safer-powered 60 Minutes seemed seriously demographically desirable by comparison.
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Even the cinematography is uneven. Battle scenes are shot in the grainy, washed-out colors found in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Generation Kill,” but city scenes are as sleek, bright and computer-generated as those on “Heroes.”
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