Some things just come together at the right time. About the same time I discovered one of the most best TV series I have every seen, “Kings”, I also had the pleasure of having a review unit on loan of the best TV possible to watch it on - the Samsung LED TV. Timing wise, this was perfect. I got to see episodes just a few days after it was shown in the US. Also, “‘Kings” is unlikely to ever show locally (even on Astro) due to the fact that it only ran for one season and also due to the implied religious content.

Anyway, “Kings” has just finished airing in the US at the end of July, and the DVD is not due anytime too soon. Kings is basically a reintrepretation of the story of King David (there’s a book of David in the Bible), but set in modern times. Most people will be familiar with the story of David & Goliath - a boy that slew a giant with a stone. In this modern retelling, ‘Goliath’ is a tank and David eliminates it with explosives. It’s an oversimplified explanation, but its better shown that described.

The cast of "Kings"

The crux of the story is basically the struggle for power between three parties - David, a simple soldier who eventually becomes a hero to his people, King Silas, the reigning king who is jealous of David, and Jonathan Benjamin, the son of the king who is conflicted on whether to embrace David as a friend or enemy, and desires his father’s power.

The King Silas Benjamin (left) and David Shepherd (right)

It’s a smart series, and it doesn’t quite fit into the mold of most shows nowadays (eg crime/medical procedural drama like CSI/House, teen comedy or soap opera). Dialogue is thick (half Biblical, half Shakespearean), and poetic especially the lines from King Silas. The best way I can think of describing it is that it’s a family drama (where the family is a royal family), with supernatural elements (one episode was particularly scary) and morality themes.

While it is ‘about David’, the main character that carries this show is undoubtedly Ian Mcshane, best known for his role in Deadwood. He was also the main mechanic in Death Race. McShane executes a great performance, with a very kingly demeanour and an interesting moral ambiguity. He’s not quite good or evil, and as a viewer, you don’t quite feel right siding with him totally one way or the other. He has one of the most arresting voices around, it has been said that he can even make reading names out of a phonebook sound dramatic.

David Shepard (played by Christopher Egan), as the main character reminds me quite a bit of like Clark Kent in Smallville - able to do some extraordinary things, but mostly an unwilling hero that doesn’t quite feel comfortable in his position, but knows his purpose and acts accordingly, though with plenty of self doubt.

Sebastian Stan as Jonathan Benjamin in "Kings"

The ‘villians’ in this story include the son of King Silas, Jonathan. Played by Sebastian Stan, he’s pretty enjoyable to watch - he channels Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl in a way…imagine if Chuck was the son of a king and even more arrogant/evil. There’s an interesting connection here - he’s actually the real life boyfriend of ‘Blair’ (Leighton Meeser) from Gossip Girl.

And the other main villian is the King’s brother-in-law who runs a large company that profits from the waging of war.

Another main character is invisible - “God”. The writers have made it rather ambigous whether some of the happenings in the show are truly the traditional Christian God that makes signs and miracles, or something supernatural, or even just pure coincedence. There are frequent ’signs’ that don’t occur naturally that influence/guide the other main character’s decisions and actions, like candles going out suddenly with no wind in sight, or butterflies making very unusual flight patterns, like resting on a person’s head in the shape of a crown.

If you enjoy series like Dexter, HBO’s ‘Rome’ or ‘Deadwood’, like watching ‘House’ to hear Hugh Laurie talk and also the character development between the other doctors, or well, enjoy shows that make you think, this is a must watch. If you’re a Gossip Girl fan…well, start watching for the cute guys, stay for the story.

So, a bit more of the TV I watched “Kings” on…

Basically when I first heard of the series, my immediate reaction was to download it. And well, given that I had the review unit…could it possibly play on my TV? I turned around the TV and I was surprised to find USB ports - you can plug any regular thumbdrive into here (I tested it with a few), and even connect your iPod to it via USB. There seems to be some special iPod support as well - it can read your existing artist and song data, and even album covers.

The main remote is pretty long, and gives you access to all TV features without you having to press any buttons on the LED TV itself. Most of the time, you just use the arrow keys and the ‘Okay’ button in the middle, as there is a intuitive interface to help you through.

You also get a mini ’smooth stone’ remote control that controls volume and channel besides the main remote control. I didn’t find this very useful, but it does look nice.

I was half expecting it not to work, that I would probably need to convert the video to make it playable. As usually video files downloaded from Bittorrent(esp large ones) use advanced video encoding (eg DivX or Xvid), and require new codecs. Even playback on a computer for some of these files is usually sometimes complicated and requires new codecs.

But it did work flawlessly, which was really cool.

Yup, those are episodes of Kings in the thumbnails.

The TV is capable of playing video (AVI files and others), music (mp3) and images (JPG, BMP). There’s probably more, but I didn’t get to test with all formats. After you’ve selected ‘video’ mode, you will then be shown all available video files. The interface is a nice touch, with the thumbnail layout slightly remniscent of Apple’s Cover Flow  style presentation.

You can fast forward and rewind with this interface.

And afterwards, you can basically pause, seek and play. There’s also a resume feature if you stopped viewing halfway, and the TV will automatically save a bookmark.

All in all, the quality of the TV is quite apparent, even when you test it using ‘lower quality’ content like a downloaded movie file instead of say, a high quality DVD. Image quality was excellent (sharp contrast, crisp picture, compression artifacts weren’t really visible). Several things to note though:

1. ‘Kings’ itself was shot on HD, at a production cost of about USD 4 million per episode. (Yes, that is ridiculously high, even by US television standards.). Of note is that I’ve also tested the Samsung LED TV with some other movies/tv series (eg Prison Break) that had lower costs per episode and also higher compression (compressed to about 200+ MB for about 50 mins of video), and the results are still pretty good.

2. The technology used to decode the DivX compressed video is quite good - there’s quite a visible difference between seeing it on a computer screen (using VLC Media Player) and the Samsung LED TV. I presume this is due to how the TV handles video smoothing, framerates and processing. The file size was a standard 280-350 MB for the files for 45-50 minutes of video.

3. I did a bit of research online, and was surprised to find that Samsung is actually the OEM manufacturer of the LCD display panels (check out this link too) for brands such as Sony, Panasonic, JVC and Sanyo. Meaning that basically, it is actually Samsung technology that is largely responsible for the picture quality even in those rival (and sometimes more expensive) brands. Interesting to know

Close up of the transparent frame & build on the LED TV

I was discussing this with someone else who had viewed the TV, and she mentioned that everything else pretty much pales in comparison once you’ve tried it. And I have to agree, as I did walk around a few showrooms in malls to get a feel of what to expect from Plasma/LCD TVs.  While slightly more expensive than the top of the line LCD TVs available now, the Samsung LED TV (check out the link for more info) is probably the best TV available on the market right now. I hope that they let me keep one of the showroom units/review units one of these days. Hahaha.

And seriously, watch Kings if you get the chance. It’s one of the smartest, most enjoyable TV series that I’ve seen around, and unfortunately, it shared the same fate as another intelligent series that I followed for quite a while - Veronica Mars, that it was cancelled. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime.

So yeah. That’s it for now. Keep watching this blog for more posts…particularly the Macau trip and Malaysian Bloggers Evening!