THERE WAS an air of something almost comical about last week’s premiere of Kings (NBC, 8 p.m. Sundays). The portentous promo spots had rolled during the network’s flagship Thursday-night bloc for months: snippets of pageantry centered around a brilliant orange, butterfly-emblazoned flag. Kings finally arrived with a bombastic two-hour opener, using up its biblical fuel almost as as a space shuttle blasting off from Cape Canaveral. After being “anointed” by a Reverend Samuels, a musical country boy named David Shepherd (Christopher Egan) achieves honor in a war against a fictitious modern-day nation called Gath. Oh, and he does it by combusting a fictitious model of modern tank called a “Goliath.” Serious.

The premiere (“Goliath”) covered a dizzying amount of acreage, much of it territory already well-trodden in TV land. Its first two hours shuffled between desert battlefields and the luxurious palace interiors of King Silas (Ian McShane), between rural countryside and a barely-disguised New York City doubling as Shiloh, the capital of his butterfly-obsessed modern monarchy. All of the Big Themes were carefully arranged: strained father-son relationships, country boys rising to political destiny, rulers scrambling to justify war and peace, greedy capitalists corrupting the government, and muttered tensions between church and state. With the exception of its blue-eyed blond hero, no one in the parade of characters introduced in the first two hours stood out as terribly believable or compelling.

But even as you winced at the baldness of the biblical parallels, shifted through long, weighty scenes that didn’t feel nearly as dramatic as they sounded, and watched the plot vacillate between The Tudors and 24, you began to see where Kings might be heading. By premiere’s end, the sweeping cityscapes, glowing sunsets, colorful national imagery, and rich interiors had taken effect. The almost-absurd Kingdom of Gilboa began to feel something like real.

The second episode (“Prosperity”) went even further toward establishing Kings as a beautiful, cinematic production, full of picturesque shots and soaring orchestral phrases. And free from its burden to foreshadow the show’s grandiose ambitions, it zoomed in tighter on the central relationship: the touchy tiptoeing between David Shephard and King Silas, the dark-but-human ruler and his future competitor. The two whisper and smolder, eyeing and spying as Silas decides whether or not the rising national star can be used to distract the press from darker political matters.

At the same time, episode two felt something like an episode of Gossip Girl, with Silas’ estranged son (Sebastian Stan) tossing out Rolexes in a crowded department store until his national-treasury-linked royal credit card is declined. (A corporate defense contractor, miffed about the king’s insistence on peace, has emptied every last penny.) That throwaway scene seemed a careless step in the weightiest plotline introduced in the premiere: the royal parents hiding their oldest son’s homosexuality from the kingdom. The cause of the prince’s revenge shopping spree was absurd—he was, for no given reason, shut out of a high-profile dinner with the leader of Gath—and his childish reaction established him as more of a cartoonish Chuck Bass than the troubled psyche set for the show to explore.

Other times, Kings falls into an almost rhythmic succession of hit-and-miss. The queen (Susanna Thompson), who chased her missing cell phone through the premiere, becomes suddenly razor sharp in the second episode, delivering well-written lines with a gravitas befitting a royal matriarch. The princess (Allison Miller) holds steady as a lovely but one-dimensional palace decoration. The one attempt at comic relief—a pair of palace guards fighting pigeon infestation—is wackier than Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute on their worst days, and not in a good way. Then, David Shepherd’s mother shows up to compensate: asked if she’s afraid her son doesn’t belong in the big city, she replies tearfully, “No, I’m afraid he does, and things never end well for the ones with destinies.”

While the show finds its footing, its leading men appear more than able to carry the dramatic weight. Watching McShane’s brooding, volatile king is like seeing the biblical Saul in the flesh—a man by turns anointed and paranoid, merciful and heartless. Egan is quickly sketching out his character to be more conflicted, less vivacious than his Old Testament muse; his scenes are always convincing and occasionally moving. But strong acting can only survive so long on hairpin plot turns. The writers should fill in the back stories sooner rather than later, as the Lost­-style glacial-pace exposition we’ve seen so far feels at best deliberately protracted and at worst gimmicky. Its appeal lies in its fanstastical setting, so the faster Kings can transport us into its universe, the better.