Netflix’s Kingdom is like if Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead had a TV baby
Kingdom opens ominously, with two attendants walking across a Joseon-era Korean palace’s courtyard to bring the king his meal. Once inside, the older attendant warns his young companion not to look into the king’s bedchambers while passing the food underneath the curtain. The young attendant can’t resist, and when he opens his eyes he’s dragged under the curtain by a snarling beast. It’s a dread-filled scene that grabs your attention, but Kingdom also uses that moment to set itself apart. Most zombie shows are centered around characters thrust into survival mode without knowing what caused the outbreak in the first place. In Kingdom, the original zombie is not just a known entity, he’s also being tended to by a royal staff.
The rest of the intro reveals a lot of information in a short amount of time. A group of scholars has been posting flyers that the king is dead and it’s time for Crown Prince Lee Chang to ascend to the throne. But there’s an issue: Prince Chang’s mother was a concubine, and his current stepmother, Queen Consort Cho, is very pregnant. Her family has seized power with their new royal status, and they’ve rounded up and tortured these scholars to find out who’s behind their support of the prince. Meanwhile, Prince Chang has grown suspicious, and decides to find out the truth about his father’s mysterious recovery from smallpox.
If that sounds more like a Game of Thrones plot than a zombie show, well, you’re right. Kingdom is really, at its core, a political thriller set in medieval times. The zombie stuff, well, that’s just part of the politics — until, you know, it isn’t.
The brilliance of Kingdom is that it doesn’t rely on twists and aggressive plot machinations to drive the show forward. The core
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