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By Peter T. Chattaway
 | | Michael Green |
THE BIBLICAL story of David and Saul is so full of drama, so rife with personal and political intrigue, it's a wonder no one has ever turned it into a long-running TV series before. But that is just what producer Michael Green has done, sort of, with the new series Kings, which premieres March 15.
Green has made some pretty significant changes to the story, though -- the biggest of which is that it takes place in a sort of alternate version of the modern world.
The biblical David who killed a giant named Goliath is now David Shepherd (Christopher Egan), a modern farm boy turned soldier who becomes a national hero when he defeats a supposedly invincible armoured tank. And the biblical Saul is now Silas Benjamin (Ian McShane, who played Judas Iscariot over 30 years ago in Jesus of Nazareth), a man who rules the nation of Gilboa from a skyscraper in a city that looks like New York but is here called Shiloh.
Green, speaking to CC.com in a phone interview from New York, says he set the series in the "quasi-present day" partly because it was cheaper than making a period piece, but also because it gave him greater freedom to play with the audience's expectations.
"I would say not everything has an exact chapter and verse analogue," he says.
"Those who are familiar with the story, I think, will be pleased with the ratio. However, if you tried to film just the dialogue as written in the Old Testament, you'd probably not be able to fill the correct number of pages. So we do necessarily have to extrapolate, and we do invent, and we do take our inspiration from the original materials -- probably much, much more so than anyone would expect. That said, there are characters and incidents and circumstances that do go beyond it, and I think everyone will enjoy them.
"I do think that many of the characters we bring into it have biblical analogues, but sometimes those don't reveal themselves instantly, so you may meet a character and not for some time understand what story they will end up inhabiting later."
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Exactly how different the TV show's world is from our own world is something of a mystery at this point. Like his biblical counterpart, David Shepherd is a talented musician -- he plays the piano rather than the harp, though -- and at one point he not only plays a real-life composition by Franz Liszt, he even mentions the composer by name and the year in which that piece was written. Silas, for his part, makes a joking reference to evolutionary theory and, at one point, even seems to quote a line from the New Testament.
Green says he can't discuss the relationship between our world and the world of the show in any detail because that would "sort of count as a spoiler." But he points to The Simpsons and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, part of which takes place on a fictitious version of Earth, as examples of other shows that have kept their audiences guessing in this way: "The joke I keep making about it is, 'What state is Springfield in?'"
The series also tackles questions of prophecy and destiny, partly through the character of Reverend Samuels (Eamonn Walker), a minister who once supported Silas but now declares that God has abandoned the current king. The show even has hints of the miraculous -- though Green says this, too, is a matter of interpretation.
"We set out to make sure that all of our supernatural moments also had pedestrian, terrestrial explanations as well," he says. "You can call it magic realism if you like, you can call it God if you like, you can call it fate or irony or circumstance if you like. The show doesn't necessarily come out and say at any point that this is one thing or the other, but it does leave it open to the interpretation. We're hoping that the show allows for that debate, where people will watch a moment and wonder what its source was."
Green has just about finished editing the first season of Kings, which comprises 13 episodes. Now, he is waiting to see if the network will renew the show -- and if it does, he says he plans to tell as much of David's life story, revised and modernized though it may be, as he can.
"One of the things people who are familiar with the story would probably agree to is that the story of David needs more than the two hours a movie would allow," says Green. "It's one of the reasons I thought it was so right for television, is because of the ongoing chapterization of it, the ongoing narrative of it, so that we could continue and let characters grow and evolve, potentially age, and to continue the story as long as we can."
March 12/2009
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