Under the reign of Ben Silverman, NBC spent a whole lot of money on Kings — about $4 million an episode. Unfortunately for the peacock network, most viewers weren’t interested and the network lost a lot of money.
After three weeks of low ratings, they shuffled the series off to die on Saturday evenings, when viewership is typically lower anyway. While many devoted fans tuned in each week to watch actors like Ian McShane, Christopher Egan, Allison Miller, Susanna Thompson, Sebastian Stan, Eamonn Walker, and Dylan Baker, the numbers weren’t enough for the show to go back into production.
Not only won’t Kings be returning for a second season but NBC isn’t planning on taking that kind of ambitious risk again. The network’s President of Primetime Entertainment, Angela Bromstad, said this week, “It was a great production, but our challenge now is, you need to sell something. People want to know what something is about.”
Bromstad continued, “Kings was a complex idea. It was originally developed when I was [at NBC] before. We didn’t make it [then] because we thought it was a little too high brow and too difficult to sell in a 30 second slot. It doesn’t mean we’re not looking for big ideas [but] they have to be big ideas that the audience can grab on to.”
What do you think? Was the concept too much for the audience to grasp or did it fail for another reason? Too good for network TV?
Image courtesy NBC.
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115 Comments on "Kings: NBC Exec Explains Why the Ambitious Drama Failed"
You Really NEED TO GIVE THE SHOW MORE TIME TO DEVELOPE AN AUDIENCE you YOURSELF ADMITTED THAT you DO HAVE a LOYAL audience GIVE it more time to GROW. AND Take A LITTLE BIT OF that $4 MILLION DOLLARS AND ADVERTISE aBIT MORE.
Great show. Hopefully someone else will pick it up. NBC has become way to cancel happy. They don’t let shows develop an audience anymore
I’ll tell you why it was cancelled. Worst. Show. Ever.
Best thing on tv! It kept you on the edge of your seat in every episode! I can’t believe it was cancelled! Somebody didn’t do their job in promoting it or something!
Just another reason NBC is trailing – no commitment to good programming. At lease CBS picked up Medium – maybe a cable net will pick up Kings. Very good program, watched live or DVRd all episodes. One of the few with a good storyline.
Battlestar was lucky it made it through 4 years. Shows like Kings, Jericho, Virtuality or Defying Gravity are too intelligent for network television or television at all and will eventually have to find its genre settling for viewership on advertising backed nternet sites in years to come
LOVE this series… but the reason it failed is because people in the United States don’t know the real story – don’t read their Bibles and don’t care about Biblical history. Remember what the blockbuster “The Ten Commandments”? That’s because people, THEN, knew the Ten Commandments and all the action that surrounded that story.
If churches, synagogues & parents would actually teach the Bible, this sort of series would be popular!
Can’t believe this was cancelled…one of the best things on. Better than all that reality bull crap!!
This show should never have been cancelled!
Bring it back.
For me, the pretentious spirituality and the absence of meaning behind monarchical order, makes for really bad story telling. The creators should spend the 4mill per episode on a Deadwood spin-off, perhaps set in New York where the Pinkertons ruled the dark alleys and Wall street. But be sure David Milch can add his magic to it.