Television audiences are generally wary of the mid-season premiere. Most shows that appear as winter melts into spring are back-ups, after all, hasty replacements for series the networks liked but audiences passed on. The impossibly ambitious new NBC drama Kings is clearly a different animal, though judging from the poor ratings of the two-hour, eleven-million-dollar pilot which aired on Sunday, audiences remain skeptical.

The series offers an updated version of the Old Testament tale of David and Goliath, with David as a fresh-faced soldier crossing no man’s land to rescue hostages and Goliath as a tank. The show is set in Shiloh, the newly constructed capital of the fictional kingdom of Gilboa, which bears a striking resemblance to gentrified modern-day Manhattan, only even shinier. Taking its premise from a Biblical tale has given the show license to cover themes of religiosity and morality, along with a host of others (the military-industrial complex, health care reform, the paparazzi, homophobia), and the show’s portentous tone permits a certain amount of pedagogy without becoming too overwrought. “Evolution is just one of God’s tools,” the king pronounces over breakfast. “Like me.” Later, as he struggles over the course of a war with a northern neighbor, he is pulled in different directions by his reverend and his financial backer, caught in the battle between piety and greed.

The major casting news is, of course, the return of Ian McShane to television as the king. As gruff and engaging here (although slightly less virulent) as he was in Deadwood, he grimaces and snarls his way through the first episode, turning soft only when he looks upon his daughter Michelle, played by the luminous Allison Miller, or his wife Rose, a sharp and brittle Susanna Thompson. The scowl resurfaces when his embittered son Jack (Sebastian Stan) slinks into the frame. And David? The relatively unknown Chris Egan maneuvers his role with skill, humanizing a conflicted character with more personality than the other Australian actor given an expensive show to carry this season (that would be Anna Torv on Fox’s Fringe).

The show evinces decidedly postmodern inclinations, riffing on Greek tragedy while spouting Shakespearean English, with Gabriel García Márquez’s butterflies thrown in. A seemingly momentous plot line about a lost cell phone becomes something else entirely, and the king’s certainty that God controls things seems at odds with his enthusiasm for independent industry—the royal family lives in the Apthorp, the grand, courtyarded Upper West Side apartment block, and the court meets in the glassy Allen Room overlooking Central Park; the marble halls of the main branch of the New York Public Library serve as government offices. All this gloss may seem a bit gauche considering the state of the economy, but a little overstuffed escapism can go a long way these days.

Kings airs on Sundays at 8 p.m. on NBC. Image by Eric Liebowitz, courtesy of NBC

KEYWORDS: Ian McShane, Kings, TV

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