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 By Peter T. Chattaway
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 prime-time soap opera before. But that is
just what producer Michael Green has done, sort of, with the new TV series Kings, which premiered 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.
 | | Biblical heavy:Ian McShane, who once played Judas, appears as Silas Benjamin - a modern King Saul - in the new NBC series Kings. |
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 BCCN in a phone interview from New York, said 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 said. “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.”
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.
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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
said 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 said. “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 said 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,” said Green.
“It’s one of the reasons I thought it was so right for
television . . . 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.”
– filmchatblog.blogspot.com
April 2009
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