NBC Made a Huge Mistake Cancelling This Modern Royalty Series 17 Years Ago

While historical shows about monarchs like The Crown, Victoria, or The Tudors are all the rage with a certain audience, taking the idea of royalty and imposing it on our contemporary world is a bit of a tougher sell. After all, most don’t want to be ruled by a king. Perhaps that was some of the brilliance of the short-lived NBC series simply titled, well, Kings. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of this 12-episode series, but if you have, then you’re probably still pining for Michael Green‘s contemporary (and highly speculative) take on an age-old story.

‘Kings’ Was a Bold New Take on the King David Story Set In an Alternate Universe

From the get-go, Kings was nothing like you had ever seen on network television before. Inspired by the Old Testament story of David and Saul, the royal drama departed from that source material to focus on the entirely fictional Kingdom of Gilboa. Ruled by King Silas Benjamin (Ian McShane), who was divinely chosen by God himself for the task, it picks up many years into his reign when a young soldier, David Shepard (Christopher Egan), takes down the secret weapon of Gilboa’s neighboring enemy Gath: the Goliath tank. The biblical names were just enough to clue audiences in on the type of story that Kings meant to tell, but also divorced enough from the original text to remind viewers that this was not meant to be a 1:1 adaptation. Nothing had ever been done like this on television before, and NBC went all out to make it happen.

As Kings continued, Silas’ place on the throne comes under scrutiny as it begins to seem that David now has God’s favor — and that of the Reverend Ephram Samuels (Eamonn Walker). This is the exact conflict between the shepherd David and Israel’s King Saul, but unlike the Old Testament tale, Kings took these characters in a different direction. From the beginning, the series was incredibly ambitious. McShane delivered a profound and powerful performance as Silas, revealing a man who wrestled with his loosening grip on power and the lengths he would go to secure it. His complicated relationship with his children, Jack (Sebastian Stan) and Michelle (Allison Miller), pushed the Benjamin family nearly to the brink.

It didn’t help that Silas had a secret family elsewhere, away from the prying public eye. While the entire cast is quite brilliant, it’s McShane who made Kings such a dramatic spectacle to behold. His ability to command the screen is like something out of theater rather than television, and yet it’s that very boisterous and dramatic nature that spoke so well to the role he played. As David so quickly rises to “hero” status in the capital city of Shiloh, gasoline is only poured more intently on the burning fire that is Silas’ slipping sanity and desire to maintain the crown.

Kings wasn’t afraid to take liberties with the source material by consistently reminding viewers that this wasn’t meant to be a true adaptation. While future projects like ABC’s short-lived (and terrible) Of Kings and Prophets or Amazon’s current streaming powerhouse House of David are meant to translate the material more directly, that was never Green’s intent here. He only used the story as a basic framework for how Gilboa would function — and the growing conflict between Silas and David as a result. The show always found new and creative ways to throw twists at the audience that causal viewers with a cursory knowledge of the material wouldn’t have seen coming. It made it difficult to predict exactly where Kings would go next and ultimately allowed the series to forge its own identity. By the end, it was going in a direction that fans have continued to speculate about ever since…

‘Kings’ Was Cancelled Before It Had the Chance To Find an Audience

Tragically, this kind of ambition fell on deaf ears at the time. Sure, not every change to the material was worth its salt (some loved Stan’s Jack, but I could never get behind the angsty, re-imagined Prince Jonathan), but Kings forged its own path. Unfortunately, the show struggled to find an audience. Despite Green’s best efforts, Kings proved too expensive for the network, even considering the program’s unique advertising partnership with Liberty Mutual. It didn’t help that the marketing for the show was confusing in itself. While Green maintained that he got overwhelming support in his desire to re-imagine the story of King David in a contemporary way, NBC refused to promote the series as such.

“There was a fear of either backlash or marginalizing or pigeonholing,” the creator told Newsarama after the fact. “They wouldn’t go near it in the marketing, but they never had a problem with it on the creative level, which is why I was so baffled.” Even all these years later, it’s a shame that Kings never really got its due. It’s disappointing, especially considering the rise of prestige TV that would come later meant there was always an audience for a show like Kings. Instead, audiences were confused as to what Kings was exactly, and we can’t really blame them. The marketing focused more on the light sci-fi elements of the show rather than the thematic content or ancient parallels, which ultimately set the show up for failure.

Kings is available for streaming on The Roku Channel.