On a chilly Brooklyn night, slouched over in a rustic office converted from a bread factory, Michael Green is trying to resurrect a biblical king. He barks out commands and the walls vibrate with loud ominous music, but this isn’t some kind of séance and there’s no Ouija board in sight. Green is making adjustments to the soundtrack of a TV series he has created. Kings, NBC says of its new drama, is a “a modern-day retelling of the David and Goliath story.” Green, ’95, watches a scene—and while we promised not to give away any plot details, we can say the show seems to give the Bible some of the popular vibe of Gossip Girl—and then tells his sound supervisor to turn up the volume. Green wants more drama, more tension.
As if he needed any more. Kings is the most hyped new series of the spring television season—perhaps you’ve seen those billboards with the orange flag and the butterfly icon? The networks have been struggling to sustain expensive serialized dramas. The ratings for Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes, Prison Break and 24 are dwindling, and ER finally will flatline this year. Few scripted shows have been given even a pilot episode. American Idol (and its reality-show kin) isn’t the only trend to blame. Next year, NBC debuts a prime-time talk show with Jay Leno every night, to avoid coming up with costlier programming. Which is why Kings is such a gamble. It’s an epic story, set in a made-up metropolis, with broad strokes of action and science fiction, and elaborate sets that couldn’t have come cheap. If it’s a hit when it premieres on Sunday, March 15, the executives at NBC will breathe a lot easier, and guess who will be their new king.
The heir apparent has spent years writing for three hit shows, Smallville, Everwood and Heroes, and another that was a critics’ darling, Jack and Bobby. He shared an Emmy nomination given to Heroes, a show, like Smallville, that reflects his stature as a comic-book geek. Further evidence: he’s a screenwriter for the 2010 live-action Green Lantern movie, and he and Mike Johnson, ’95, write a DC Comics series that brings together Batman and Superman.
In 2006, Green started developing a show of his own. He’d always been interested in religion and mythology, and he one day envisioned the story of King Saul and the rise of David recast in modern times. He took two weeks off from Heroes and cranked out the first draft for a pilot episode. (He finally finished revising it during a Christmas trip to Paris.)
NBC’s president at the time, Kevin Reilly, passed on the series. But a year later, as Green’s agent was trying to place the show on another network, Reilly’s successor Ben Silverman, who was shaking up NBC’s programming, indicated an interest in shows that retold classical stories. Kings got the green light.
Among the works Green wrote at Stanford, there were a column for the Daily and a one-act comedy called Eggs for Ram’s Head. In Eggs, a workaholic twentysomething woman living in New York discovers she has only one gamete left—and needs to decide in two weeks if she wants a baby. Looking back, Eggs was like a plot out of Ally McBeal before that show went on the air. Such high-concept comedy became part of Green’s stock-in-trade as a writer.
“Witty doesn’t even begin to describe him,” says Victor Wishna, ’97, a friend and Eggs actor who remembers that Green taught him “if something is 51 percent funny, you should go for it.” After graduation, Green adapted the story into a screenplay, and his agent used the draft to set up a meeting with Darren Star.
Star was creating a show named—stop us if you’ve ever heard of it—Sex and the City. He liked Green’s writing voice, and told him the show was about journalism—a sex-advice columnist, to be precise. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s funny, I used to write columns’” —yes, the Daily ones—“‘about my crappy dating life.’ I went home, photocopied them and ran them to his house the next day.” Green worked as a Sex scribe for a full season; he wrote the episode best remembered for Carrie Bradshaw’s farting in bed. But he left when he was offered a job on the Jeremy Piven comedy Cupid, which tanked so fast it broke hearts. “Then Sex and the City exploded, and I was like, ‘oops.’”
Kings stars Ian McShane, famous as the town boss of Deadwood, as King Silas, and up-and-coming Australian heartthrob Christopher Egan as David Shepherd. (If the show survives, expect to see Egan on the cover of every teen magazine, like a long-lost Jonas brother.) Although the plot’s origins are biblical, it’s a secular show—as modern and biting as Battlestar Galactica or The West Wing, to name just two of the shows Green admires.
Green, who works in sneakers, has so much nervous energy he plays with a pair of blue scissors while being interviewed. His office is just above one of the most elaborate sets of his show. It’s Silas’s kitchen, and Green wanted it to be fit for a man who rules. He had the set’s designer install so many massive appliances it looks like Costco invaded. Martha Stewart would be shamefaced here.
Speaking of food, it’s almost dinnertime in the real world, and Green looks tired. On his wall, there’s a calendar with deadlines for each of the first batch of episodes—they’re working on about a dozen right now. He says he wakes up, writes, comes to work, writes, goes home, writes.
“There isn’t much downtime,” he says, but he spends all of it with his wife, Amber, and their 6-month-old daughter, Orli. The Greens used to live in Los Angeles, but they moved to accommodate the shooting of Kings in New York. They’ll stay in the city as long as the show is on the air.
“It’s a big sink-or-swim,” Green says. “It either gets big numbers or it dies, and I’m fine with either. Anything is better than somewhere in the middle, because they’ll try to fix it—cut your budget, focus [only] on the things people like. It’s like trying to fix a broken relationship. It’s better to break up.” Then again, as Carrie might say, this could be Big.
RAMIN SETOODEH, ’04, is an editor at Newsweek.
