House of David

Jon Erwin’s House of David is a mixed drama about a change in leadership, with an awkward shortage of interest in the man who gives it its title. Its scale suggests a programme determined to make the struggle matter, and there is some pleasure in that determination. Yet King Saul and his family hold our attention more securely than David does. The problem becomes difficult to ignore whenever we are asked to care about David simply because he is David.

Michael Iskander has the harder assignment as David, whose characterisation offers too little to sustain the attention being paid to him. We found him frustrating, because the writing leaves so little for us to discover about him. The teleplay credits include Jon Erwin and N.D. Wilson, and the scripts need to give their leading figure more personal detail before expecting us to invest in his growing importance. Asking for doubts, habits or contradictions is hardly asking the programme to abandon its subject.

Ali Suliman’s King Saul benefits from the stronger material. The family drama gives leadership a recognisable human cost, and makes the people around the king worth attending to in their own right. Ayelet Zurer plays Queen Ahinoam, and this part of the programme has more of the friction that the David material needs. The programme becomes easier to care about when a change at the top also means a change for the people around Saul.

The spectacle supplies another reason to persist, although it is an unreliable one. The giants are striking to look at, and their sheer size shows why this story might benefit from a production willing to think on a large scale. But the effects are conspicuous enough to make us notice the work of assembling the image when we should be thinking about the creature itself. There is ambition here, and some visual pleasure, but the artificiality keeps interrupting it.

Against the demands of a drama about power, the writing is too easily satisfied with the importance of its central figure. Such a programme needs to give us reasons to care who leads, beyond the fact that leadership is changing hands. Saul’s family comes closer to doing that, because its relationships give us several people whose lives might be affected. More spectacle cannot solve that difficulty, however much care has gone into making the programme look substantial.

There is enough in the Saul material to make the weaknesses disappointing. A smaller emphasis on display and a more searching interest in David might have brought the two sides closer together, without requiring the series to become a different kind of drama. We would leave this to viewers already drawn to the story, and even they should expect to spend some time waiting for Saul.