{"id":28866,"date":"2016-04-17T22:35:51","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28866"},"modified":"2016-04-17T22:35:51","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:35:51","slug":"the-pop-of-king-a-kingdom-that-didnt-come","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-a-kingdom-that-didnt-come\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: A Kingdom That Didn\u2019t Come"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a> As April of this year passed and I got more and more Kingdom Hospital DVDs marked \u201cdomestic broadcast version,\u201d two things became apparent to me. The first was that the shows were getting steadily better. The second\u2014by tax day it could no longer be denied\u2014was that we were going down the tubes. That was a Maalox month for me, and I often found my thoughts turning to the great screenwriter William Goldman\u2019s First Rule of Show Business: \u201cNobody knows anything.\u201dKingdom Hospital should have worked. It was based on a Danish miniseries that was both funny and scary. We had a great cast, including two Academy Award nominees (Bruce Davison and Diane Ladd). We had a network (ABC) that was fully behind us, because I had delivered successful miniseries projects to it before and because it was desperate for a hit. I had a near-perfect rapport with my KH writing partner, Richard Dooling, who knows plenty about medicine and whose macabre sense of humor is in perfect harmony with mine. Add to this a producer with whom I\u2019ve worked for 10 years, a director who heroically signed on to shoot all 15 hours of the show (and work with the same core crew throughout) to give the series a seamless, made-by-hand feel, and jeez louise, why wouldn\u2019t I feel confident?<\/p>\n

ABC execs felt that way too. Not everything I\u2019d done for them was great\u2014only God gets it right all the time\u2014but some of our cooperative efforts, such as The Stand and Storm of the Century, had done well with the critics as well as in the ratings. The network made no secret of wanting a marquee dramatic success in the midst of the reality show glut. Also, ABC had something that, to my knowledge, it never had before: every single script. This made the show easier to budget, easier to schedule, and much easier to cast (actors love seeing the whole arc of their characters). And for ABC it became easier (at least in theory) to evaluate Hospital\u2019s chances of success. What the network believed\u2014what executive producer Mark Carliner and director Craig Baxley believed, what my cowriter, Rick Dooling, and I myself believed\u2014was that KH was going to be a roaring success. As late as this March, Rick and I delivered a season 2 \u201cbible\u201d which the Alphabet net bought, paid for, and eagerly received.<\/p>\n

Of course, most of the execs who bought that bible\u2014and Kingdom Hospital in the first place\u2014were gone by May, part of a major network shake-up that may not be over yet. KH was \u201cput on hiatus\u201d (net-speak for \u201cget that dead fish outta here so it doesn\u2019t stink up the May sweeps\u201d). It will finish, however; those of you who want to see how the story ends\u2014which it does rather splendidly, I think\u2014can watch the final four episodes that began June 24 with \u201cThe Passion of Reverend Jimmy,\u201d our tip of the cap to Mel Gibson.<\/p>\n

So who\u2019s to blame for this el floppo? The network? That would be an easy answer\u2014ABC has fallen on hard times\u2014but it won\u2019t wash. ABC promoted well and delivered a large enough audience for the premiere episode to land in the Nielsen top 20. After that, watching the ratings was like watching a man walk down a set of suicide steps. We went from 5.5 to 3.7 to 2.3, finally bottoming out at something like a 1.0, which is basically the ratings equivalent of the black death.<\/p>\n

Was it the story? Man, we all thought that the idea of ghosts in a modern hospital was a groove, and European audiences flipped for the Lars von Trier version. American audiences may not have been comfortable with the mixture of realistic hospital triage and supernatural goings-on in the Old Kingdom, which, as loyal viewers know, is Kingdom Hospital\u2019s darker half.<\/p>\n

My wife\u2014who wrote the story on which \u201cThe Passion of Reverend Jimmy\u201d is based\u2014may have come closest to the real problem after watching the first episode. She was very quiet after it was over, and I asked her, with some real concern, if she hadn\u2019t liked it. She said she\u2019d liked it fine, but added there was \u201ca lot of heavy lifting in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew what she meant, and that was when my first feelings of unease surfaced. There was a lot of heavy lifting in that first episode, and in the next couple, too. I think there\u2019s a lot of fun to be had in them as well, but Kingdom Hospital really is a novel, not a bite-size TV series like CSI or Law & Order, and most novels offer readers a deal: If you give me some time and effort, I\u2019ll pay you back double… or triple… or, in the case of the great ones, maybe a dozen times over. With KH, I realize now, we were asking viewers to give us a week or two, maybe three, and that was more time than most were willing to give.<\/p>\n

Am I putting TV viewers down, accusing them of being dumb? I am not. You come home tired, you want something that\u2019s fun and familiar? That\u2019s fine. It doesn\u2019t preclude the thrill of discovering something new\u2014just look at the success of 24. All I\u2019m saying is that inertia is a tough barrier to crash through, and Kingdom Hospital wasn\u2019t capable of doing it. Those last four episodes sure are fine, though\u2014for me, they pay off like a jackpot in Vegas. I only wish I could have brought a larger audience along to collect it.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As April of this year passed and I got more and more Kingdom Hospital DVDs marked \u201cdomestic broadcast version,\u201d two things became apparent to me. The first was that the shows were getting steadily better. The second\u2014by tax day it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28866","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28870,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28866\/revisions\/28870"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}