Finally caught Kings last night, although the stream from the NBC website was at a low enough frame rate that it seemed a little more abstract than it was supposed to.
Basically, this is a series about a powerful man with a wife and adult children who live under media scrutiny in the big city, with the protagonist being the upstanding outsider who they both befriend and find useful. If this makes you think of Dirty Sexy Money, well, you won’t be the only one (and if you and everyone else don’t think of DSM, then I guess I’m the only one.) However, that show was about salacious silliness, at least when it was any good; this show is supposed to… um, I’m not sure. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be a serious look at how monarchy would work in a modern, first-world nation, but we don’t get much of a sense of how it works, and the world construction around it, while not very detailed yet (I’m sure more will be revealed) is unconvincing in what it reveals. It may be supposed to be a translation of traditional power dramas to modern times. But the overall effect of the two-hour premiere (clocking in at about 83 minutes on the ad-free internet stream) is Here’s A Bunch Of Obvious Plot Points Going Nowhere. Whatever this was supposed to be, it fit its form so exactly that there were no surprises along the way. Everyone was playing a broad type rather than a character (though Ian McShane does play a man of power well, but that was known) and all the steps they took were right in with the definition of that character.
This does not get put on the must-watch list.
