Remembering Kings, NBC's attempt at an ambitious Prestige TV drama

The Hollywood Reporter

It's been exactly 10 years since the premiere of the NBC drama starring Ian McShane that was loosely based on the biblical story of King David. "Kings failed and failed aggressively, one of the more expensive one-and-done duds in recent TV history, so it's hard for me to lament the kind of trepidation that would prevent a network from trying anything like Kings now," says Daniel Fienberg. "But lament I do. At its best, Kings was shockingly good and completely without parallel in the broadcast landscape. At its worst, Kings was still a work of boundless and audacious ambition, an astoundingly big swing coming from a corner of the medium that was in the process of learning to become risk-adverse and timid. As it stands now, ABC, CBS, NBC and even once-bold Fox have allowed their drama slates to become shades of beige, uninteresting swaths of Chicago/New York/Los Angeles (or Atlanta if they're feeling WILD) procedurals, cookie-cutter mythology shows and increasingly degraded spinoffs and reboots and uncredited copies of properties that passed their most successful sell-by dates years ago."