I mentioned it briefly yesterday, but the way language works in Kings deserves further attention. I know it’s not always considered a good thing when a show uses language unrealistically, but I have always been a fan of written conversation that aspires to something other than, for instance, the vocabulary and rhythm of Two-and-a-Half Men. Gilmore Girls is one often-cited example of completely implausible television language, where everyone speaks at a lickety-split pace, and every clause is peppered with obscure pop culture references. Sure, it’s not the way any normal human speaks, but it’s an instantly recognizable pace and tone that defined the show as unmistakably itself. Aaron Sorkin also leaps to mind, because no one can possibly run around the White House talking like Josh and Sam and Toby, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.

The same is true for Kings, which seems most powerfully influenced by the linguistic power structures of a Shakespeare play. If you’re depicting a king chosen by God, he should look, dress, and behave differently than mere mortals, and he should also speak differently. Ian McShane plays Silas as conscientiously aware of his language, switching from condescending colloquialisms as he makes breakfast to a classical royal third person when he rebukes David. “Do not presume to tell us what to do,” he snaps. “We are King, and we do as seems right in mine eye.” Silas also delights in speechmaking, especially when he can endear himself to his people. On the annual day of justice, Silas quiets the cheering crowd with a particularly dramatic linguistic flourish. “Whereas,” he intones, “we made law where there was none, we mined justice from sand. Whereas we have courts, civil and criminal, presided over by a tribunal of judges, who all apply good law with study, intelligence and compassion… ten cases, here selected, I alone will adjudicate, divine wisdom my only council, and my gavel sound only after my words correct what is not right.” The inverted syntax, the emphasis on sound, repetition, and syllable pattern, and the grandiose implications, come straight out of Julius Caesar or Henry V.

Silas, speechifying

Without slipping in too many spoilers, it’s worth noting that the language seems to come not just from Silas, but from the position itself. When his scheming brother-in-law attempts a coup d’etat and addresses the court, he unwittingly adopts kingly speech patterns. “Now you’ve got me doing it!” he shouts, after employing some lovely parallel structure. The downside of the decision to endow powerful characters with elevated language is that not all the actors can pull it off as gracefully as Ian McShane, who seems to be the only one comfortable shouting things like, “say otherwise again and we will snap your neck right now!”

The upside of a linguistic Shakespearean model is that it leaks into the larger structure of the show in positive, interesting ways. The first generation/second generation divide that informs inevitable power shifts, the jealous uncle, the all-knowing family servant, are all familiar tropes that call back to Hamlet and the history plays. Most obviously, the two gatekeepers who comment on the daily menu and keep track of visitors are classic lower-status mechanicals, and they seem to have walked into Kings straight from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Aside from being a smart, thoughtful, literary move for the show, the Shakespeare effect has the added benefit of creating a plausible context for the biblical settings and characters. Place names like Shiloh, Gilboa and Gath have a less jarring impact when spoken in a language slightly removed from our own. What’s more, the expression of God’s wrath feels real and frightening when described in fully formed, multi-clause sentences. If characters in Kings spoke like characters in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the whole project would quickly become a cheesy televangelising biblical update show.

The mechanicals, using various means to clear pigeons from the eaves

There’s plenty more to say about the brief lifespan of Kings, but I’m going to leave it alone for now. Except to say that you should watch it, because it was worth watching, and nobody did.

All thirteen episodes of Kings are available to watch on hulu.com until September 20^th, when presumably the series DVD will be released.

Although summer TV does seem to be dominated by bad, trashy, poorly written or reality-contest based programming, it also has an important role for the networks. Summer programming is the place for television misfits. It can be the moment to test quirky outsiders like last summer’s The Middleman, which never found an audience and died tragically under-appreciated, or it can be a dumping ground for shows that no one knows what to do with. The classic case-in-point this summer was Pushing Daisies, which was built as a big fall season show two years ago, got all messed up by the writer’s strike, and then returned only to quickly die. Except, when ABC stopped airing Pushing Daisies this year, there were still three episodes that hadn’t been shown. What to do with three lonely, orphaned episodes? Just play ‘em randomly in the middle of the summer!

The other major example of this phenomenon has been NBC’s original drama Kings. It launched last season with a tepid publicity push, and then NBC realized they had absolutely no idea what to do with it. The show was tabled until the summer season, when the few remaining episodes aired every Saturday at 8pm. I’m pretty sure even CSI would eventually die if new episodes played on Saturday nights in July. Needless to say, Kings has not been renewed, and when the last new episode aired this weekend, it was with the sense of watching a ghostly apparition walking around waiting for someone to put it to rest. Another one bites the dust, this is a dead parrot, kick the bucket, dead on arrival, poor Judd is dead, Death in Venice, ashes to ashes, Death Valley, death be not proud, Deathly Hallows, deader than a doornail.

Except! Except. Kings was actually a pretty great show. It had its weaknesses, and some episodes were predictable, and some of the acting was amateurish. But at its best, Kings was an astonishingly original television show with an amazing lead actor, a beautiful visual and verbal style, a fertile, high-concept premise, and some awesome ideas. For the millions who haven’t heard of it much less seen it –

Ian McShane as King Silas; David stands up to a modern Goliath

Kings uses a retelling of the biblical story of David to imagine what a religiously driven monarchy would be like in the twenty-first century. That last part is interesting enough in and of itself. What does it look like when a modern, wealthy, technologically advanced country is run solely from the whims of one guy? It’s a fascinating thought, particularly when that guy is King Silas, charismatic and powerful and intelligent and dark, and played by Ian McShane. Watching a king decree his absolute power over a country that looks so uncannily like our own gives Kings a healthy dollop of political innuendo, but God is really the most fascinating presence on the show.

In many ways, Kings is most clearly related to a vastly different show: Battlestar Galactica. For both shows, the larger premise drives the main action and shapes each episode, but the presence of an unknowable supernatural influence motivates characters and defines the tone. While most of the plot revolves around defeating the Cylons or eliminating political enemies, God and faith lie at the core of every dramatic turning point and every emotional climax. Both shows were ambitious, striving to depict universes with characters both human and divine.

David as God's chosen one

Why, then, did Kings fail so dramatically when Battlestar Galactica has been a huge success? The easiest, and probably accurate answer has a lot to do with where they came from. While Battlestar Galactica had a hyped up, curious audience and a narrowly-defined cable channel to nurture its growth, Kings was thrown into a network schedule seeking to reach the most people with the least effort. In addition, what was then the clearly named SciFi channel knew how to sell their product. From the beginning, Battlestar Galactica was a space opera, with the bonus of some intense, socially relevant religious commentary. NBC never knew what Kings was, much less who might conceivably want to watch it.

I’m going to talk in more detail about Kings tomorrow, but it’s important to consider what happened to this show as a potential morality tale for what’s happening on network television. The King is dead. Long live the…?