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There was an unintended biblical theme to my reading and viewing during the Lenten holidays. I watched the first four episodes of the NBC series Kings, a modern-day retelling of the Book of Kings, created by Michael Green, starring Ian McShane as the Saul character (Silas Benjamin, as in tribe of) and Chris Egan as David (Shepherd as in shepherd). When the series begins the Kingdom of Gilboa is at war with Gath, whose leaders look like grizzled Israeli warhorses (I expected the general to have an eyepatch). Gilboa is ruled by King Silas, who likes to tell the story of how God sent a sign that he’d been chosen to lead the nation. Because it is the 21st century, he later acknowledges evolution as fact.

Kings has three major assets: the cinematography to support its epic aspirations (Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) directs), the dialogue which goes for poetic diction and biblical cadence, and Ian McShane, who can deliver these strange lines and make you believe them. (“We are a king and we do what is right in mine eye.”) As he amply demonstrated in the HBO series Deadwood, McShane is an actor of Shakespearean dimensions. He can play a ruthless demon bastard whose actions make your blood run cold, but you can’t help liking him, and you want him to like you. (In Deadwood his Al Swearengen made the good guys look flat and dull.)

Chris Egan (from Eragon) seems a little tentative, but his character at this point is a callow youth who is only beginning to understand his destiny. The survival of this strangely beautiful new series is reportedly in doubt, but I’m already surprised it’s on regular TV at all.

Meanwhile I’m reading Gomorrah (as in Sodom and), Roberto Saviano’s insider account of the workings of the Camorra, the organized crime network in Naples. Gomorrah was a huge literary success in Italy, where it’s been made into a movie. Saviano got a slew of awards, and he’s still under police protection.

Gomorrah is compelling, gut-wrenching stuff alright, but it probably reads better in Italian. In English it is highly melodramatic, reminiscent of angsty journals by people who lived on graphic novels and Nine Inch Nails. “The port is detached from the city. An infected appendix, never quite degenerating into peritonitis, always there in the abdomen of the coastline. A desert hemmed in by water and earth, but which seems to belong to neither land nor sea. A grounded amphibian, a marine metamorphosis. . .” We get it: he’s passionate about his subject.