I was chatting with a friend on Twitter yesterday about the crime that is the all-but-certain cancellation of Kings.
I first met Dan during the (partly successful) fan uprising to keep Jericho on the air.
For those of you unfamiliar with the late, lamented CBS show, here’s the basics in a nutshell:
A tale of a small Kansas town and its residents in the aftermath of a nuclear attack on most of America’s major cities, Jericho debuted in September 2006 to decent ratings, which it held onto through the fall before going on an unannounced winter hiatus.
By the time CBS brought it back in the spring, many people had forgotten about it; some thought it had been canceled. The network didn’t really publicize its return, either, leaving some fans happily surprised to stumble upon it.
It ended its season with OK, if not stellar ratings, but a very passionate fanbase, who were stunned when CBS announced, after the finale aired, that the show would not get a second season.
Harkening to a line spoken by Skeet Ulrich, who played the lead character Jake, in the finale, fans started sending peanuts by the truckload to CBS headquarters.
After receiving enough peanuts to feed every elephant in the world for the rest of their lives, CBS relented, somewhat and greenlit a short second season as a midseason replacement.
Again, the network stumbled, and waited to put it on the air until after the writer’s strike was over and new programming was once again finding its way to the airwaves. In the end, Jericho was canceled a second and final time, though it has found an extended life on The CW and Sci Fi (now SyFy) networks and its creators are still pursuing the possibility of a movie.
An undercurrent to the entire ordeal was this: Jericho did great on DVR ratings and online viewing. The regular old Nielsen ratings weren’t measuring the show’s true viewership, fans argued. The network didn’t listen.
What does any of this have to do with Kings?
Once again, a network has to realize that the regular way of measuring viewership is dead. Ratings will never be as high as they once were and perhaps the networks have to start looking at shows with smaller ratings, but high quality and a passionate viewership.
Kings might not have ratings that traditionally would be considered strong enough to stay on a broadcast network, but the thing is NBC Universal owns USA, SyFy and other cable networks. Why not just shift it to there?
The show stars Ian McShane, for goodness sakes! The man is basically incapable of performing poorly. I think he could read the phone book and I’d watch, mesmerized.
NBC gave the OK to the Kings pilot at the last minute before the writer’s strike at the end of 2007, and it started airing in March (2009). On Sunday nights at first, long the venue for HBO’s top-shelf shows and Fox’s Animation Domination, it was moved to Saturdays a couple weeks ago. Then it was put on hiatus until June.
Look, folks, if you want to build up an audience for a high-concept show — a modern-day allegory for David and Goliath, where a young farm boy becomes enmeshed in high society and the royal court after all but single-handedly defeating the huge, militaristic neighbor to the north — don’t start moving it all over the map and then putting it on haitus.
In some ways, it’s not the worst thing; there’s less new programming on during June, when most shows have ended, but the “summer season” hasn’t really begun. But if you move a show around enough times, you make it harder for the audience to find it. Especially when the primary news about its moves and changes comes out in the trade press and then blogs – and not from the horse’s mouth.
Kings is superbly written and acted and has a beautiful, CGI-altered New York standing in for Shiloh, the capital of McShane’s beloved Gilboa. It has enough soap opera elements (the king has a son by his mistress, whom he truly loves, and a son and daughter by his wife, whom he married for the political connections; our contemporary David is in love with the king’s daughter; the crown prince is secretly gay but must give up his love if he wants the crown – plus, he’s jealous of O.C.D.) to appeal to those who don’t like the deeper Biblical paralells, but deep enough for those who like a little meat on their nighttime soaps without the silliness of, say, Dirty Sexy Money.
I have no illusions that this blog post – or any other, for that matter – will save Kings from cancellation.
Unless someone has access to a huge supply of cocoons about to open into beautiful butterflies that we could send by the truckload to 30 Rockefeller Center in New York.
Anyone?