'Kings': An ambitious but puzzling take on the Old Testament

"Kings," which begins Sunday on NBC, is certainly the strangest series to be offered by a major network in this slowly unrolling winter season, a parallel-world modernizing of the biblical story of King Saul and little David, who with his sling slew Goliath and later became king himself. (Goliath in this case is the name of a kind of tank, and the sling is a bazooka.)

Playing like some weird mix of "Dirty Sexy Money" and "Battlestar Galactica" -- though I doubt that was the pitch -- it is an interesting muddle of a show, smart and silly by turns. It's corny, ponderous, literary, ambitious, obvious and, at the beginning at least, as slow as molasses, but continually re-energized by Ian McShane as King Saul, or, as he's known here, King Silas Benjamin, possibly because Saul Benjamin sounded too Jewish.

Whatever religion these people practice -- and there is a lot of calling on God, and the winning and losing of his favor -- it isn't the one followed by the authors of the Old Testament. The King's brood is solidly Anglo-Saxon, or whatever they'd call it in this world. Country boy David (Chris Egan), who is called David Shepherd -- you know why that is, Sunday schoolers -- comes right out of a Norman Rockwell farmhouse. And the prophet Samuel has become the Rev. Samuels (Eamonn Walker), whose presence speaks Black Church -- although Jesus isn't a player in this realm, either. There are mystical butterflies, however: the sign that showed Silas his destiny and the sign that shows Silas David's destiny.

As Saul was the first king of Israel, so King Silas has created a new nation, Gilboa, and raised a great city, Shiloh, from which to rule it. (Shiloh is basically New York with digital alterations.) The people, seen in great computer-animated crowds, make happy sounds, even though a war is still being fought against the kingdom of Gath, a few hours away. (It's as though the United States were at war with Canada, if Canada were more like Russia -- Gath has a "premier" and a military culture.) It's in this war that David not only slays a Goliath, but rescues the king's son, Jack (Sebastian Stan), and so becomes a media star and a threat to the king.