Seriously: what do directors say to Ian McShane? “Listen, Sir Ian–oh, it’s just Ian, is that right, somebody must’ve blinked, huh?–anyway, Ian, I hate to do this to you, I know you’ve been giving it your all for days now and that you were up all night deflowering virgins and rescuing orphans from burning buildings, but see, the thing is…there’s a lot of Russian mob money tied up in this production, and word came down that if there’s any chance that the audience is able to take their eyes off you at any point of the finished film, the next time I get to see my kids will be when their pictures are on the side of milk cartons…” I myself was late in discovering just how unworthy I am to share a solar system with Ian McShane. It didn’t happen until I saw Sexy Beast, the kickass British gangster movie in which McShane, wearing an expression of weary dyspepsia and a topping of shiny black hair that looked as if a buzz saw couldn’t get through it, played a crime lord known as “Mister black magic himself,” Teddy Bass. (A tip for any aspiring writers of hard-boiled crime fiction: be sure and name one of your seedier characters “Teddy.” McShane in Sexy Beast, Mickey Rourke in Body Heat, John Malkovich in Rounders–it always works.) Before then, I had a vague impression–based mostly on a few lame old movies (If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Last of Sheila) and several thousand commercials for the series Lovejoy during its run on A & E–that McShane was a lightweight fellow with a tendency to sort of twinkle at the camera. So seeing him as Teddy Bass, the kind of dark lord who makes mere career criminals shake a little in their shoes, who’s never scarier when he’s trying to be affable (“Gentlemen, you’re all cunts!”), was a rude shock: either I’d been ill-informed and/or half-blind or he was a motherfucker of a late bloomer.
Even so, seeing McShane make a meal of such a flashy part didn’t automatically spell it out that he’d be able to do what he did as Al Swearengen on Deadwood and what he’s doing now as Silas on the NBC series Kings. Both characters dominate and define the society they’ve built around them, and both make their own laws (and both have had scenes in which they’ve knifed men to death in the sanctity of their offices); each role would have provided a fine chance for a public humiliation if they’d been handed to an actor who was unable to convincingly pass for the man whose vote always means more than that of anyone else in the room. In both shows, McShane supplies the necessary charisma and gravity with no visible effort, and so is able to spend his time riffing–sometimes delicately, sometimes broadly; almost always with irony, yet often with surprising depths of emotion–on the nature of power. In the early stages of Deadwood, Swearengen seemed to be the show’s villain, the brutal primitive who simultaneously represented the beginnings of frontier captitalism and also what had to be erased before the west could be “civilized.” I suspect there were any number of different moments in the show’s run where different viewers came around to thinking of him as the hero, and something of a tragic hero at that: by the end, it was impossible to miss that Swearengen was fully complicit in ending his own way of life.
Silas, the theocratic ruler of a modern monarchy–and, in the context of King‘s set-up, an analogue of Saul, the Biblical mentor and rival of David–is both more instantly sympathetic and more reluctantly conflicted. The pilot episode ends with Silas’s witnessing a miracle that he takes as a sign that the David figure is meant to replace him as the true king, and also with premonitions that David is connecting romantically with Silas’s idealistic and beautiful daughter (Allison Miller). Silas isn’t ready to give up either–”I love you so much,” he tells his daughter, “that it embarrasses us both,” though he also admits that he “preferred it” when his children were “small and manageable”–even though he himself frets over the possibility that he has lost God’s favor.
At its most shallow, Kings is a lively soap opera with a lot of smart actors–including Susanna Thompson as Silas’s queen, Dylan Baker as his power-broker brother-in-law (a role that takes full advantage of Baker’s ability to make blandness seem sinister), and Eamonn Walker as the head of the church–to keep the sparks flying. (David is played by Christopher Egan, a pretty young Australian actor with the ability–a rare one, and in this show, an essential one–of radiating naive, pained decency without making you want to throw something at him.) It is often much better than that. As that line of Silas’s about loving his daughter indicates, the writers sometimes slip into a slightly heightened, theatrical form of speech that fits the fantasy setting, and they’ve slipped McShane some gloriously florid speeches and turns of phrase. (I sometimes imagine professional Hollywood writers storing these bits of verbal filigree up while living in hope of sometimes having the chance to hand them off to an actor capable of knocking them out of the park.) McShane latches onto his grandest opportunities with a verve that can make you worry a little about the furniture, but he can also do amazing things with no words at all. The most recent episode ended with Silas’s discovery that David had lied to him about his relationship with his daughter, which came just hours after Silas’s decision that, in David, he had found someone he could actually trust. The tearful expression on McShane’s face upon learning the truth was that of someone who’d been cast out of Eden.
The first–and, it turns out, the sole–season of Kings is set for DVD release at the end of September. Why wasn’t the series picked up for renewal? Or, more to the point, why was it given no chance to earn audince that would have gotten it picked up for renewal? NBC originally positioned Kings as a hip show for people who don’t watch a lot of network TV, a pitch that helped, albeit briefly, to make a phenomenon of Twin Peaks and a critics’ darling of Homicide. When the show premiered in March, it did well enough to give the network something to build on, but after four weeks they shifted it to the network TV dumping ground that is now Saturday nights, and then they yanked it from the airwaves for a stretch. (It’s now on Saturdays at 8 PM, with four hours left to go. Episodes can also be viewed on Hulu.) It’s not the first time that something good on TV has failed to win the support of its network, of course, but Kings seems to be an interesting, special case because the Bible story connection seems to have spread confusion and misgivings throughout the network ant farm, creating pockets of resistance.
The show is the brainchild of the writer-producer Michael Green, who’s credited with the idea of using the story of David as the framework for a modern serialized story. According to Green, he encountered nothing but encouragement from the NBC people he had to deal with while developing the series and shooting it, but the marketing department got cold feet over the Biblical angle. Kings was sold with a fancy-shmancy ad campaign built around mysterious images of Chris Egan in his military uniform and the butterfly logo that Silas has adopted for his regime. It seemed to suggest that the show was a sci-fi allegory along the lines of The Prisoner–not entirely misleading, but even if you didn’t know anything about the show, you could all but smell the fear behind the campaign, which emanated from the marketers’ determination to not even hint at what the story was about. The question is, were they afraid that the sophisticates would reject the show out of hand for fear of getting religion on them, or were they afraid that Bible belters would have a freak out because their mythology was being hijacked to provide diversion for sniggering blue-state decadents?
Probably a little of both. Kings isn’t anywhere near as close to religious propaganda as moralistic sweet slop like Highway to Heaven or Joan of Arcadia; it uses the Bible story and characters as a jumping-off place to get to its own world. But it also deals with characters who believe in a God and in visions and moral instructions, and who struggle every day with trying to figure out just what these concepts have to do with their lives. The results can get thorny. (The doting father Silas is also a fanatic homophobe who threatens to disown his gay son, the crown prince, if the boy doesn’t learn to deny his own heart. Silas himself has a secret “common” family–a second wife and a sick child–out in the woods. When he slips away to restore himself by spending time with them, his security detail codes his activities by reporting that the king is “in serenity.”) Probably a lot of people in TV remember the headache they got over The Book of Daniel, and over Nothing Sacred more than a decade ago. But those were heavy, self-consciously “serious” attempts to address religious people with shows that took a solemn look at the issues underlying their faith–which means that they probably had the same degree of appeal to religious people, and to the rest of us, as a deadly John Sayles movie about the nobility of the working poor has to someone who just got off his second job and wants to be entertained. Kings is solid entertainment, and NBC might have built a bridge, and an audience, if they’d unapologetically informed secular viewers that they were mining the melodramatic appeal that Cecil B. DeMille and company found in the gospels while cooking up a study guide program that they could hustle to religious families who’d have loved to have had an excuse to watch this thing if only someone would help them pretend that it was good for them. Instead, the MBC marketing division pulled its head in, kept its mouth shut, and prayed that the storm would just pass without anyone hitting them. Nobody ever beat Goliath that way.
–Phil Nugent
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