“Fighting’s a mind-fuck,” Frank Grillo says in the beginning of this trailer, presumably summing up the whole gist of DirecTV’s Kingdom. Grillo plays the owner of Navy Street MMA, where his sons and trainees regularly get involved in sanctioned beatdowns. The 10-episode first season will feature Nick Jonas (of the Jonas Brothers), Matt Lauria (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood), and Grillo’s The Purge: Anarchy costar Kiele Sanchez.
“We’re not going to be featuring a fight a week,” creator Byron Balasco (Without a Trace, FlashForward) said of Kingdom in July. “MMA is such a unique cross section of people and I was interested in why these people do what they do, why they’re particularly drawn to physical violence in ways that we … avoid doing.” In lieu of a steady fight docket, it looks like we’ll get family drama, mentor drama, sports drama, burnout fuckup drama, and heavy exposition, possibly with a tint of Rust Cohle philosophizing. “Most guys run from fights,” Grillo muses, “’cause they don’t want the answer to the inevitable question that they whisper to themselves: Am I one of the weak, or am I one of the strong?” We’ll find out Kingdom’s answer to that question on October 8.