By Brianne Hogan.

The new biblical drama Of Kings and Prophets has everything you might expect from a premium cable series: sex, violence, and bloodshed. Except it isn’t on a premium cable channel, it is on the Disney-owned ABC.

Perhaps this is one reason the series has received so much criticism. For example, the Parents Television Council has asked ABC to cancel the show, claiming that it “demonstrates a disconnect” between the entertainment industry and family audience.

However, any show about religion is bound to risk causing offence, and as showrunner Chris Brancato reveals, it is exactly what ABC asked for, when they told him to “go for it”.

Creative Screenwriting talked with Chris about the challenges of writing a series based on the bible, how his experience with hard drama influenced the project, project, and giving the series a “modern pulse.”

How did you become involved with the project?

I became born again. [Laughs]. No, just kidding. I was finishing Narcos and was approached by ABC to show run it.

There were personal reasons why I chose to do it. The first reason was that the second season of Narcos would require me to live in Colombia again, and my teenage kids and my family would have a tough time with that, and so would I. So I was able to do this show from Los Angeles, even though we shoot in South Africa. So it was a lifestyle choice on the one hand.

And secondly, I was very, very drawn to this story. It is one of the most well known stories in history, the story of David and Goliath, yet it is one of the least known stories, at least it was to me. It’s about David fighting Goliath, and how he became the king of Israel. 

Although I find the story of David and Goliath interesting, I find the other stories surrounding it, so much more interesting. I was also drawn to the fact that David, who is mentioned over a thousand times in Bible, is a fleshed-out character.

He is a hero. He’s a warrior. He’s lustful, he’s a poet, he’s a trickster, he is an adulterer, he is ultimately a murderer. He is so many different things that he is often described as the symbol for the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience.

So I thought it was an incredibly rich and interesting character to do a show about, and strangely enough, having just finished a show about Pablo Escobar, as I was reading a biography about David, I found some parallels between the two men. They were both charismatic and complex characters who both stood outside the law. So I guess I like doing shows about complicated men.

You’re mostly known for your work on crime dramas, like Narcos and Hannibal. How does your work on those previous projects inform this one?

That’s a good question. Hard drama, be it fictional like Hannibal or historical like Narcos, is my cup of tea. And I didn’t know the Bible was going to be my cup of tea either until I read the Book of Samuel and I read all these biographies, and I realized that there is a lot of Biblical scholarship about the historical reality of these stories, like whether or not David existed – I choose to believe he did.

And so I look at these Biblical histories in their own right. And I think when you watch the show, you will see our aim is to do something that ABC, a network that is usually traditional, doesn’t usually do. Which means to go dark and edgy and do premium cable stuff for a network and do an event-like show that tells the story in a way that befits the incredible and historical drama that it was.

So I didn’t approach it all that differently. I did a bunch of research, and I worked with my writers with characterization and the character arcs. Some of the characters were fleshed out in the Bible, but others were not. For example, the women in the Bible, particularly in the Book of Samuel, are undercooked in the extreme. The female characters aren’t given any dimension at all. We aren’t given any motivation or description, and that is because that wasn’t what they were writing at the time.

The Bible is a record from 750-900 BC, perhaps written by God, perhaps written by men. So, therefore, we had to take dramatic license to fill in the characters and restore all of the characters, really. In one instance, Saul apologizes to David for trying to kill him, and in the next paragraph he attempts to kill him again. No explanation why; it just jumps to that event.

So we were forced to do is look at all the events in the Book of Samuel and decide in nine episodes how we could best do a faithful rendition – and by faithful, I don’t mean that it is exact or that it is trying to literally transcribe one event and the other – but faithful to what the story was about, which was the ascension of this very unlikely, insignificant young shepherd to the most powerful position of the land.

And we also sought to find that modern pulse to the story, which means to this modern world that we all feel outsiders to the kingdom, and it is our job through whatever means we choose to have faith to charter our destiny and to deal with the fact that we are highly fallible as human beings.

That is what we try to render faithfully in the show. We’ll receive criticism on filling in the negative space, meaning the things that weren’t written about and left blank. We’ll receive criticism for casting different ethnicities in different roles. All of those things are to be expected when you tackle this subject matter, but at the same time we stay close to the story and I am very proud of what we did with the show.

How much research is needed for a show like this? Did you have to read the Bible numerous times to grasp the story?

Well, I read the first Book of Samuel and the second book of Samuel a number of times so that I would be intimately familiar with that. I listened to some taped courses of the Old Testament, which was a great overview. And one of our executive producers is Reza Aslan who is a religious scholar at the University of California Riverside.

So he was always around to ask questions, like, “Hey, if we did this, how would that play?” Or he would tell us, “I just read the script, and I think you are missing the point.”

In addition I read biographies on David and so did our writers in the writer’s room, and then it became this freeform discussion about how do we chart the things that we read as well as the information in the Bible and how do we add to that the motivations and machinations of the other characters?

What are some of the challenges of writing a series that is based on such heavy source material like The Bible and filling in the gaps?

Filling in the gaps is about building out the characters. Saul’s wife is Queen Anohim and his daughters were Michal and Merav. Merav is promised to David, but David says “I don’t want Merav, I want Michal,” and that is the plot in the Bible.

So Saul says, “If you want Michal, then you have to prove that with the blood of your enemies, and so I want you to kill a hundred of Philistines, and as a proof, I want you to take back with you 100 Philistine foreskins.”

Some of the comments I saw on the Internet were “are they really going to show 100 foreskins on an ABC show?” And I assure you we are.

So, we looked at this kind of outrageous situation and said, “Wow. How would a woman react to being betrothed to the man who killed Goliath, and for him to say, ‘I don’t want you. I want your sister.’”

And so we looked at how people would react if that really happened to them, and the after effects of it, and explore that relationship between Merav and David.

David, eventually, ends up winning the hand of Michal, so where do we go from there once they got married? So we followed the tent poles that were set in the Book Samuel and along every turn we inserted interesting dialogue that pushes the story forward and gives characters more depth, and not have it sound like it is too contemporary or too formal.

So that was a challenge.

You went from doing Narcos on Netflix and now you are back to doing a network show. How is that different from a creative standpoint?

To my great surprise ABC has given us the freedom to make the show we want to make and it has been shockingly wonderful. I can point to a few reasons why.

One, the source material is the Bible and it is going to be what it’s going to be. Maybe it’s because I have worked with ABC before and they had faith in me to deliver a show they would like. Maybe it’s because they saw the show and they thought, “Okay, it looks like it is going well.” Maybe they are busy and have bigger problems with other shows, I don’t know.

But I experienced the same level of creative freedom to be able to choose the stories and to choose the certain actors we wanted to cast as I did with Netflix. So as much as I appreciated Netflix’s freedom and boldness in regards to Narcos, I have had the same experience with ABC. I don’t know if it’s because I am an old veteran that they trust, or if there is another reason, but I had an absolutely enjoyable experience with working on the show.

Because it’s the Bible, there is going to be criticism. So does that affect what you write, or are you going to just write the story you want to tell?

Look, a couple of factors affect the way you make a show on this subject matter for ABC. If this show was made for HBO or Netflix, for example, I might choose a smaller, niche way for telling the story.

I might take a longer look into the relationship between David and Jonathan, who some reported to be bisexual lovers. I might go more niche and explore further what the characters use of God does to further their own selfish motives.

I don’t know because I wasn’t asked to make the show for those networks. But what ABC suggested to me, which was very surprising and bold, and they said, “Don’t go make us a traditional, brightly lit happy-go-lucky Biblical thing. Go for it.”

A plus or a F – that’s how they put it. If you are going to do a B, C or a D, then forget it. Now I can’t guarantee we did an A-plus, but we certainly didn’t do an F. They encouraged us to push the envelope in terms of creating a realistic setting, authenticity, violence, sexuality, challenging the word of God who is spoken through man.

God doesn’t speak on our show because in the Bible God stopped talking after Moses and used prophets to spread His word. So ABC wanted us to do a premium cable show on a network. But we do have standards and practices and we are on a major free network, so what we are aiming to do on a broadcast network is to appeal to the broadest audience possible without pandering.

The Old Testament was filled of sex and violence, some of which we had to scale down, but I think we have a nice balance of both the love subplot and the fighting, which I hope viewers will respond to.

How relevant is a story like this today?

I don’t see a reason to do a period piece unless there is a contemporary relevance. In other words, as a writer, it is not that interesting for me to do a documentary piece on Samuel. Frankly it is only worth doing if there is a commentary on what is going on today. There are contemporary parallels in this story. We are dealing in a world where different regions are hotbeds for war and existentialism and struggle.

What we are watching here are the Israelites fighting for the right for their nation, and obviously we know Israel has undergone trials and tribulations throughout its entire existence. We can obviously make contemporary connections there, but let me stress that the Philistines are not the Palestinians. But what they did do is challenge Israel’s right to exist.

That is a conflict that is at the center of world affairs today. But to go even further, and on an elemental level, it is a story about the most unlikely guy being chosen for high office. It’s Bill Clinton being born in a trailer in Arkansas and ending up President of the United States. It’s the story of anyone coming from nowhere and by virtue of charisma, calculation, and a little lust, ends up charming people and rises to a level of greatness. And by the way, David also has a spectacular fall and dies a broken old man. So, for me, that is the most interesting part of the story.

There is another aspect that is interesting. Who do we individually listen to in order to get our faith? Do we go to church, and listen to priests and rabbis? Do we do it on our own? Are we athiests? Who are you getting the message of faith from and can it be trusted? The show kind of trucks the question, but doesn’t actually answer that question.

The final thing I will say is I spoke to a pastor and he said one of the most difficult thing tasks he had to do was take this ancient text and make it relatable to modern congregations. How do you take these archaic words and make them feel contemporary and alive?

A TV series breathes life into the characters and if nothing else creates a point of discussion for the Biblical story and what it means. So if people criticize the show, I would encourage them to first watch it and then read the Book of Samuel and see how we were inspired by it.

Featured image by ABC publicity.

If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to check out our interview with Chis on Narcos: