Kings and Serfs

In a previous post, I declared how delighted I was that Shiloh is on a major American media outlet although it wasn't my Shiloh but a mythical one.

Nevertheless, sounded good.

Here's a recent interview with the writer and creator:

'Kings' of Manhattan

...Praised by critics for its imaginative writing and polished big-budget look, the show has marked both a professional step forward and something of a return for Green, the son of an Israeli mother and American father who grew up in a suburb of New York City. Shot largely in Manhattan - the program's offices overlook Central Park and the palace is located on the Upper West Side - Kings brought Green back to his hometown and to the city of his first writing job, even as it "rounds out the Jewish day-school education" he received as a child.

"It was a very, very big creative decision" to bring the show to New York, Green said recently in a telephone interview. "We just felt very strongly that to sell the idea of a modern monarchy, you needed a real city that was a real capital - that was just royal, really, and Los Angeles doesn't have that appeal."

THAT SAID, the city that appears in Kings isn't quite New York - the show's characters know it instead as Shiloh, the newly rebuilt capital of Gilboa, a war-torn country with a deeply divided populace and an unpredictable, often combative monarch...As the show's biblical roots suggest, the city is modern in look but not in nomenclature, with its name shared by the ancient city where the Israelites kept the Ark of the Covenant, which was later captured in battle by the Philistines.

That ancient enemy is never mentioned in Kings, where the protagonists instead face persistent questions over a war with a different hostile neighbor, the made-for-TV country of Gath. The Bible's greatest Philistine figure does live on in Kings, however, with the warrior Goliath reincarnated here as a tank that David destroys with an explosive rather than a slingshot.

With war constantly in the background and residents of one outlying area demanding that their "God-given land" not be traded to Gath, viewers might see certain parallels with other regions of the world...

...The New Yorker calling the opening episodes "engrossing" and "compelling," and The New York Daily News describing scenes that are "brilliant and subtly turned." (Not everyone agreed, however; Time, being cruel, termed the show "fascinating pretentious hoo-ha.")

VIEWERS, BY contrast, have mostly been oblivious, with Kings' debut earning disappointing ratings and moving nowhere fast. After airing just a few episodes, NBC announced that it would move the show to Saturday night, which "usually means the network is done with something and that they're just letting the episodes play out," Green said. Last week, the network announced it would take Kings off its broadcast schedule entirely until June, when it will return to the air to complete its 13-episode run...