'We put everything into it even when nobody was watching:' The story of 'Kingdom,' an MMA TV show that got it right

Early on in the first season of 'Kingdom,' there's a scene that tells you that you're watching something made by people who know the fight game.
In it, the character of Jay Kulina, played by Jonathan Tucker, is telling his brother, played by Nick Jonas, about a fight he's just agreed to. It's in a higher weight class. And he's taking it on very short notice. Also, one of his hands is already broken and he has neither money nor health insurance with which to get it fixed. But taking the fight means he can claim the injury happened in the cage, at which point the promoter's insurance will be forced to cover it.
His brother tells him, actually, that doesn't seem like a great plan.
'It's a terrible plan,' he replies. 'But I believe in myself.'
That's the moment I knew, there's something to this show. The people who made it actually knew what they were talking about. It wasn't the same formulaic sports movie with MMA plugged in almost as an afterthought. It was very much set in the MMA world that I knew and recognized after years of covering it as a journalist.
Which made me wonder, why hadn't I heard of it before? I was watching it on Amazon Prime, years after its three-season run had ended. It originally aired on DirecTV's 'Audience Network.' If you're wondering what that even is, you're not alone. Many people who had it as part of their DirecTV subscription didn't realize they had it, or just didn't care. As a result, 'Kingdom' aired to a small but committed audience from 2014-17 and then quietly disappeared.
'It just didn't have the reach,' said series creator Byron Balasco. 'And they just never had the appetite to put the kind of money into marketing that you'd need to really cut through and let people know about it, especially in this day and age.'
Years later Balasco would hear from people who found the show on one streaming service or another. And many of the actors — people like Frank Grillo, Paul Walter Hauser and Tucker — would go on to much bigger things after the show had ended.
But going back and talking to the stars now, what you discover is their deep affection for a show that made it a priority to get this world right. Even if very few people saw it at the time.
Hauser (who played Keith): 'I desperately wish 'Kingdom' had been on HBO or Showtime or FX or something, because we would've had such a better shot at visibility. But I am grateful for the 40 episodes we got from the folks at DirecTV, the Audience Network. … I like tuning in to watch character-driven shows, to watch how those actors portray characters, and it's a top-five character piece for me. I fell in love with these people and I desperately cared for them."
Tucker (who played Jay Kulina): "It felt like, if people actually saw it then they loved it. But nobody could find it or figure out how to watch it. It was super frustrating, but there's a give and take to that. When it's not a huge hit, you have all this freedom. There wasn't any kind of cast animosity about, you know, who's standing where or what promo photo one actor likes but another doesn't. You get into that sometimes in this business, and I really have no interest in participating in that. It gets weird. This really gave us a beautiful little bubble to do some authentic work that we found extraordinarily satisfying as actors and as human beings, and with a great crew that, honestly, really made this show what it was."
Balasco (series creator and co-writer): "I mean, we were on the Audience Network, DirecTV, with very little reach. But creatively, I never got notes. No one was ever telling me what I could or couldn't do, which I guess is the tradeoff. I could do what I wanted and they gave me total control, which was just great. And I'm completely grateful to them for that.'
Grillo (who played Alvey Kulina): 'Do I wish more people watched it? Of course. But I also feel like those who did see it, whether it was when it aired or on some streaming service later, it really resonated with them. They felt for those characters. I'm proud of that.'
The concept of the show is simple. Alvey, a retired and still somewhat famous MMA fighter, owns a gym in Venice Beach, California, where he trains his two sons, Nate and Jay, among other pro fighters. His girlfriend, Lisa (played by Kiele Sanchez), is the business brains behind the operation, and together they struggle to hold things together through all manner of personal, professional and financial challenges.
While the MMA world is the backdrop, it's as much a family drama as it is a show about a specific sport. That was always the goal for Balasco, who wrote the first scripts 'just to show people what the show could be,' he said.
'I had been into MMA for a long, long, long, long time,' Balasco said. 'Like, we're talking back when you literally had to go to Blockbuster Video and find it next to the 'Faces of Death' tapes, you know? There weren't weight classes and I was just like, this is like nuts. And I was really just curious. First of all, I wanted to see which fighting styles would really work against others. But then also, I just got really curious as to who does this. Who are these people? Especially back then, when there really wasn't any money in it.'
Tucker, who would go on to roles in shows like 'Westworld' and 'American Gods,' was very much not an MMA fan when he first heard about the role.
'I thought it was cockfighting for humans,' Tucker said. 'I thought it was the lowest form of entertainment, that it was bad for the people who did it and bad for the people who watched it. I basically thought it was bad for, like, human dignity. I actively disliked it. And then once I got to really know it, I did a 180-degree change of opinion on this sport and the people who participate in it and support it.'
What first got him to reconsider his opinion was the script itself. Balasco had written interesting characters, Tucker said, and ones he felt like he hadn't seen on screen a million times already.
Grillo, who would go on to play a recurring role in several Marvel movies, remembered reading an earlier draft of the script that was somewhat less impressive.
'But then I remember Byron went out to Albuquerque, hung out with [MMA trainer] Greg Jackson for a while, then came back and wrote a second script,' Grillo said. 'And the second one was really great.'
The show benefited from the expertise of several experienced MMA fighters. Joe 'Daddy' Stevenson and Juan Archuleta both played roles on the show. The actors also spent time in multiple gyms, going to regional MMA events and gearing up for their roles with actual MMA training. It was brutal work at times, they agreed, but added to the authenticity.
'When they asked me to come on they said, well, for insurance purposes, we need to know what the actors will be doing,' said Stevenson, who fought in the UFC from 2005-11. 'So I broke it down. I told them, in 10-minute intervals, what they would be doing for five hours a day for two weeks. I mean, everything: boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, judo, Muay Thai and then finally into MMA. They worked alongside my students and worked in pairs with real fighters. I just thought, fighting is fighting. If you try to fake it, it's going to look fake.'
When it came to casting the show, there were two surprise decisions that Balasco later credited with making a major positive impact on the final product. The first was Nick Jonas, a former child star famous for his music career with The Jonas Brothers. The other was Paul Walter Hauser, who's gone on to star in films like 'I, Tonya' and 'Richard Jewell,' among others.
Jonas played the youngest Kulina brother, the darling of the family and the fighter with a bright future and dark secrets. Hauser played the role of Keith, an awkward ex-con living in a halfway house with one of the gym's fighters.
Balasco: 'Nick at the time was just coming out of the first iteration of the Jonas brothers when this happened. So he was a little bit at loose ends and wasn't sure what he was going to do next. He had done some acting, but not a lot. His agency kept saying, 'Hey, you've got to see Nick Jonas for this role.' And I was just like, no way. This is exactly my nightmare. I thought, you cast him and it sounds to people like a kids' show or something. I refuse to even see him, wouldn't let him audition, didn't want anything to do with it. His agency kept pushing and then I was like, fine, he can come in. So he came in and as soon as he walked in, I realized, 'Oh, maybe I don't actually know who this guy is.' I knew who the Jonas Brothers were, but I'm a little older than their demographic, so obviously I wasn't listening to them. As soon as I saw him do his first audition I was like, this guy's like got something. So then I brought him back to read with Frank and they read, and Frank improvised and kind of pushed him toe-to-toe. It was just immediately like, you know, he's got a quality to him.'
Grillo: 'I honestly didn't know what to expect. But once we started working together, I thought, 'He's perfect for this role.' There's a vulnerability there, and also real strength. It just comes across.'
Balasco: 'I mean, he's a star. You can just kind of see it. And I still was nervous to do it. And then I just kind of woke up one morning. I was like, he's far and away the best guy for this. You just got to have some balls and cast him. And I did. I just look back and think, 'God, what if I wouldn't have done that?' What a mistake that would have been."
Tucker: 'I think what comes across on screen is our chemistry, that kind of dynamic there. For something like this to work, you need actors who are willing to take chances and be unafraid. He did that. Everybody did.'
Balasco: '(Hauser) is an interesting story. He hadn't done really anything. I mean, a couple of little things before he got to us and I had actually already cast the role. I had already decided on a guy for that role, which was only supposed to be like one or two lines in the pilot. And then my casting director sent in one more tape, a straggler, and it was Paul. And I was immediately like, 'Oooh, I like this guy. He's going to be the guy.' And so I cast him and then he worked the very first day of shooting, first day of the entire show. He was shooting with Ryan (played by Matt Lauria) in the halfway house. One of his first scenes was the scene where he's wrecking his room because he can't find his little teddy bear. I was like, this guy is great. From then on it was like, 'He's in there, he's in the show. No matter what, I'm going to find stuff for him in every episode.''
Hauser: 'I was always wracked with this giddy yet nervous discomfort of what unexpected thing was going to take place. And that's a testament to Byron Balasco's writing, that it was a show where you never really knew where you stood. Something awesome or deeply tragic and life-altering could happen at any point in any episode. That's why I really think it was a special show.'
The show ended in 2017 after 40 episodes. As with many shows that struggled to find an audience, the later episodes ramped up in intensity as if searching for some outer limit that might force people to take notice. Its portrayal of the lifestyle and the struggles of MMA fighters and coaches always remained authentically gritty, without slipping into the territory of sports movie cliches.
As Balasco put it, 'Everything else I'd seen had always felt like B-movie 'Rocky' knockoffs, and I just knew that whatever we did I didn't want it to be that.'
Stevenson served in a hybrid role as choreographer, consultant and minor character throughout the show's run, lending his experience and at times marveling at how well the show captured the lived-in experience he knew.
'I can remember several times being like, 'Wow, this actually happened to me. Or it happened to someone I know,'' Stevenson said. 'I don't know if the average person watching really realized it, but it was real in a lot of ways.'
After its rebirth via streaming apps, some fans of the show pushed for a revival. Balasco and Grillo said they'd both received multiple pleading emails. Tucker recalled fans hitting him up on Twitter to pitch the idea of a reboot. It's flattering, they all agreed, but unlikely and maybe even unnecessary.
'I kind of feel like, where we ended it is where it should have ended,' Grillo said. 'Maybe that's one good thing about a show that never got super popular. We told the story we wanted to tell and that was it.'
Balasco agreed.
'It's one of those things where we had so much fun making it and we were all so close and really put everything into it even when it felt like no one was watching,' Balasco said. 'When somebody says we should go make more, your instinct is like, 'Hell yeah, let's get the band back together.' On the other hand, I tend to agree with Frank. I mean, I think we sort of ended the series, emotionally, where it should end, you know?'
It's still out there for people to discover, if they're so inclined (currently streaming on Prime and AppleTV). And while he would have liked the show to have been more appreciated in its time, Balasco said, the upside of it being on an obscure network was in many ways worth the detriments.
'I mean, yeah, it never had the reach we wanted and the studio didn't make the greatest business deals around it,' Balasco said. 'But you know, sitting here today, I'd say it was worth it for the freedom that we had to make what we wanted.'
Tucker still feels a pride and an affection for the show due to how relatable it managed to be even for those who weren't big fans of the sport going in, like him. Reading the script got him to reconsider his biases, while working with the fighters and being around the sport made him appreciate the things that drew people to fight sports in the first place.
'It's that metaphor, right?' Tucker said. 'Like that scene, it's a terrible plan but I believe in myself. I mean, isn't that all of us? We're here for however long on this one little planet that we know we're going to die on. People lose their parents, they lose children. Cancer comes out of nowhere. No one gets out alive. It's a terrible plan. But you've got to believe in yourself. Put your chin down and your hands up and go out there and fight.'

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