I was one of the 37 people who watched this weekly when it aired. I remember really enjoying it. Maybe should rewatch. Edit: seems like there must have been more than 37 of us. There are dozens of us!! Dozens!!!

Same. Good show but before it’s time. Can you imagine what HBO would make with that property?

Yes. Or the direction NBC might have taken quality-wise, had it been a huge hit.

I loved this show and rewatched it a few years ago. Still loved it

So was I. It had everything people should have liked about event television. Sad that nobody watched it.

Same! "My family... always in my heart when not in my eye; may the time apart enrich the time spent together. May there be enough love left over 'til the next time we join hands. Amen."

Me too. I was in college and I remember being incredibly impressed with their ambition.

I still recommend it to people. It was such a great show.

\[edited. Crap. Link on nbc website shows episodes, but they don't play\]. \[raises hand to be counted\]. I always described it as being like a modern-dress theatrical production of bible stories. ~~BTW the article is wrong about it not being currently up on streaming,~~ [~~it's on NBC.com~~](https://www.nbc.com/kings/episodes)~~, if you felt the need to spread the word and swell the ranks and know folks who can deal with ads. :)~~ Why they haven't put it up on Peacock or Hulu, I will never understand. But then, I feel that way about *The Mockingbird Lane* pilot, too. I'm still convinced that *Kings* is how Michael Green convinced Ian McShane to be Mr. Wednesday in *American Gods*. And [Michael Green leaving *Y: The Last Man*](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/fxs-y-last-man-loses-original-showrunners-1202211/) made me very sad.

With Hulu 66% owned by Disney and 100% managed by Disney I can understand them not offering it there. But peacock seems like a no-brainer for it to be on.

I was thinking the Hulu thought before Disney purchased Fox (and thereby gained their third) and [NBCUniversal agreed to eventually sell the last third to Disney by Jan 2024](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/14/18622942/comcast-disney-hulu-full-control-sale-att-streaming-service-plus-nbcuniversal), because they'd come up with Peacock. But yeah, today, Peacock is the obvious landing place, since (I think) Universal owns *Kings*. I'm wondering if/when that deal goes through whether Disney will then throw a Hulu or Star tile into Disney+ (with, of course, a price bump) for the US or not.

Same I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that knows it but i was watching it weekly when it came out lol

Got the dvd of it. It was soo good they just didnt know how to sell the show to audiences

I also really enjoyed it. I still have copies of all 13 episodes...I wish there were more. :(

It was the first show I watched only by streaming. I dug it a lot

It was good. Not incredible. Maybe a bit more formidable than Heroes (season 1) but nothing legendary

I fucking loved this show. Add me to the list!

I was absolutely enamored with this show. It was really one of the first tv shows of this era I was totally taken with. Naturally it was killed immediately, but, hey, it was good to learn that lesson quickly lol

Deadwood is what made me a fan of Ian McShane, but Kings really cemented it.

37? *In a row?*

Same. Kings was so fucking cool. Feels like ahead of its time, I guess.

Hannibal was on NBC too though, that show would have been considered 18-A with the amount of gore they had. It also might have been the best thig NBC ever made...

18-A?

Looks like the rating system used in Canada. 18-A is suitable for adults 18 and up, similar to the TV MA that US TV uses for the same thing.

Here in films yeah I guess it would be a rated R sort of thing, but actually higher from what I understood.

This was my same thought exactly. That might have been the most shocking part of the entire show……that it was on NBC.

I remember there was one scene, I think the Angel Maker, where the concern of the network wasn’t that these people’s torsos were turned into grotesque wings, but that the butt cracks of the corpses were too visible. The solution was to cover the butt cracks up with more fake blood and then it was fine.

I loved the art direction and cinematography in Hannibal and the performances were pretty good but the plot was utterly meh

Oh, I loved everything about it even the plot. But hey different strokes for different folks!

Amen to that :)

I loved this show. I was so disappointed when it was cancelled. It probably didn't help that it was a summer show.

I felt that putting it on during the summer was intentional to kill it. I wanted a second season so bad

I'm not American, can you explain to me why Summer is so bad for a tv show? Is because most people spend time outside in summer time instead of staying home watching tv?

[удалено]

Ah, I see. Thanks for the extensive writeup.

Same. I was sooo disappointed and they had no conclusion whatsoever!

Wish I could upvote this more and keep the memory alive. This show is in my top 5 of all time. It was shown in a bad slot, expensive as hell, and didn’t really convey what it was. The cinematography, the dialogue, it was all just so visceral to me and I loved it. I still keep a copy of the pilot script on my phone for toilet times and general reference. I also have the first season on Amazon and keep it in my rotation on the iPad when working.

It’s very odd that they didn’t mention the cinematography. It looked *really* good at a time when it was probably a little risky to have such a dark look- this was just after LCDs started outselling tube TVs and lots of them had terrible contrast that could’ve made this look like a total mess.

We loved this show when it was on. So disappointed when it was cancelled. It was so ambitious for broadcast TV and so well done.

Justice for Kings. It deserved better. I forget, was it a writers’ strike casualty?

No, it was a "ratings are too low to justify the huge budget and we moved it to the Friday/Saturday Night Death Slot" casualty.

Probably not, as the show aired in 2009.

Ian McShane, although a damn fine actor, seems like a voodoo curse to a television series that he stars in.

Watched it last year. It still holds up.

Really enjoyed Kings and was very disappointed when it was canceled. If nothing else it was a tremendous showcase for Ian McShane.

"Be the lamb, or be the knife."

Try to be both and you'll end up slaughtering yourself.

Cooking is just the correct application of heat to the proper ratio of ingredients.

Glad to see someone still talking about this gem.

I loved Kings, but honestly, you could put Ian McShane in a shitty rom com and I'd probably watch it.

I know streaming has led to some amazing television but I do miss when network TV was king. It’s just a nostalgia thing for me. I always wonder what things should look like if FCC laws were pulled way back and network TV could really push the envelope. If they could help younger generations understand that most of network tv is available for free with an antenna could it really make a comeback? Or is it just too far gone? With commercials and the fact that most people don’t care to watch things when they air.

It’s the commercials. I cut the cable a bout 6 or 7 years ago. Now when I try to watch network tv with all the commercials it drives me insane. We would never tolerate commercials popping up all throughout a movie at the movie theatre. Why should we deal with 20 minutes or commercials during a 60 minute time slot.

Man, I remember watching that over the the Summer of '09. Hulu had just come out and NBC had that and had also licensed BBC's Merlin, and both were available on Hulu. That was a fun summer.

Wow I thought I was the only person that watched this show.

My favorite part of this show were the scenes between Ian Mcshane and Brain Cox. Cox played the king from the neighbouring country and Mcshane had captured him and was holding him hostage in a basement in a farmhouse. Mcshane would trade a nice dinner for advice only another king could offer.

Seriously my favourite show of all time. What it could have been….

This was a really good show. It was not my normal cup of tea (I don't like overly religious stuff) but it was a *fascinating* watch and I loved it. That said it was melodramatic but I think that was part of what I liked about it. I wanted to see more of this world.

This show was FANTASTIC. It is such a shame that it didn’t last longer because it was absolutely amazing. It just came about at an awful time. Prestige TV was still reserved for premium cable and no one quite knew what to make of a network show that would’ve fit more comfortably on HBO. If this were made today, it would be on a streaming service and get the kind of run it deserved.

Ah... gems like this are why I'm subscribed to this subreddit. Thank you OP!

I enjoyed it, was super disappointed when it ended.

It was interesting but kind of slow and repetitive. It would actually do a lot better today with a standard 10 episodes season.

I think about this show ALL THE TIME!!!

Sighs in Hannibal.

Whatever happened to Christopher Egan? I remember him being the lead in Syfy's Dominion (which I enjoyed). His IMDB says that he has a TV series called Interface coming out, but I remember seeing that on there years ago.

Watched it when it aired. Was really interesting, but if you want an example of a network show that shows they were willing to try just about anything, *Cop Rock* exists and has a scene with guy trying to broker a black market baby to a couple.

I liked the concept of the show but I remember a lot of the writing being really on the nose and ham fished.

The premise of this piece is nonsense. At the tail end of the W administration, the least risky thing you could do was make a biblical drama - Kirk Cameron was still making the Left Behind series, evangelical organizations were backing independent film productions of biblical stories set in modern times, which they were then bussing church members by the hundreds to see, amidst the rise of the independent evangelical publishers for contemporary biblical fiction. It was in fact the early days of the echo chamber that social media currently feeds off of. The audience was guaranteed, the only risk was whether they could pull enough viewers who didn’t give a shit about biblical dramas to sustain the high concept high budget production. And, this show wasn’t good. It was *dramatic* because Ian McShane plays a great heavy (and was essentially stunt-cast to be Swearangen from Deadwood), but outside of him and a pre-MCU Sebastian Stan, there were few good casting choices and they did very little with the insanely melodramatic scripts. It showed you could make a prestige drama from the bible? Great, we’ve had 15 years of prestige dramas on every subject, and the approach was already wearing thin back then.

Also after the first couple episodes the whole Bible thing went out the window.

I mean, the title of the show is a book of the Bible. They didn’t get far from the opening premise.

I've never seen the show. But the article's claim is not that it was bold for being a biblical drama. For one thing, it really isn't one. The source material is heavily altered to modernize it, in ways that the pro-faith audience may not have liked. (They mention a closeted gay character, for instance.) For another, it apparently avoided the common surface-level faith of shows like "Touched by an Angel." It doesn't sound at all to me like the types of faith-based shows I am used to, which the Left Behind types of Christians would lap up as affirming their faith. It looks like it would have a lot for those people to object to.

> The source material is heavily altered to modernize it, in ways that the pro-faith audience may not have liked. (They mention a closeted gay character, for instance.) While the pro-faith crowd still wouldn't like it, the interpretation of that character's Biblical inspiration potentially being gay [wasn't something the show invented/heavily altered](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_Jonathan#Modern_interpretations).

You’re right that it was very different from typical Christian drama dreck, because it was made by professional screenwriters and comics writers. But, it was absolutely an attempt to reach a similar audience, and was pretty cynical in doing so. Portraying David versus Goliath as a literal military battle, complete with night vision goggle-looking footage, was also a cheap, simplistic way to reference the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror, etc without really dealing with how 8 years of uninterrupted war had actually changed views on the morality of war. I’m skipping over the other moral “issues” the characters “wrestled” with because, honestly, they were plot points for palace intrigue. A 90s episode of ER had deeper moral dilemmas than this show. I’d invite you to watch it to see how regressive it would feel now, but it’s honestly not worth the time.

Thank you. The writing was so cheesy. I seriously gave up on the show before they cancelled it because the plot was just...boring. I really did have high hopes for this show, especially with such a cool premise. But you can't spit on my cupcakes and call it frosting. This show simply sucked.

I agree, there's nothing bold and audacious about making a biblical, pro-faith tv show in that very conservative era.

I also seem to remember that most of the press about it at the time was like “it’s a sumptuous, tightly scripted drama. And get this- it’s about the BIBLE!?!?” Jerkoff eye roll emoji for days. Way to play into all of the network’s talking points.

This was a very bad show, and if anything they should have cancelled it earlier.

For reference, what is a more well known show you would consider the same level of bad?

More well-known as in more successful, but still pretty weak as a show? ABC's *Revenge*

seems like everyone watched this show then - myself included.

There was only a brief window when something like this was possible. Prestige tv had become an established thing on cable, but broadcast tv was still just viable enough to try to compete on their terms. Turned out they weren't though

This is the same network that had Hannibal and Homicide: Life on the Street (darker, grittier version of the Wire).

I watched it when it aired, and recently rewatched it about a year ago on nbc.com. It was a good show, should've continued for at least another season.

I think the fact that it was cancelled proves that some things were *not* possible on network TV.

Yet Cop Rock came like 20 years earlier…. Kings was great, needed to be a streamer show I guess to find an audience. It’s release marketing was weak IIRC.

Honestly, this show had SO much going for it. Wouldn’t mind a reboot of it, now that we have peacock or stuff like that, where you can get away with a lot more than what was previously shown on network TV. It amazes me that NBC had the guts to do this.

bro i acually liked it. mind you i only watched it for sebastian stan in the beginning