In an era in which TV showrunners are often celebrated as towering art monsters, stomping their signature onto a tame medium, the Kings are refreshingly life-size: a family-oriented, hardworking couple, orderly in their lives and so polite that it’s hard at times not to feel rude around them. It’s the kind of charming origin story you might hear from friends of friends at a dinner party-likable types with a reflex toward self-deprecation. On the drive home, they had a bemused conversation: should they tell their parents that they’d set the date? Instead, when Robert asked if they could marry in the Church the priest misunderstood-and pulled out a calendar. Because Robert was set on a Church wedding, they’d scheduled an “informational” meeting with his parish priest, planning to have a tentative discussion about whether that was even possible. Robert was a devout Catholic, the middle child of seven in a tight-knit Italian-Irish family Michelle was a secular Jew, the only child of Holocaust survivors.
“Oh, this story really makes me sound like a Catholic asshole,” Robert, who is sixty-two, said, looking at once amused and chagrined.Īt the time, in 1987, the couple had been dating for four years. One day last fall, as Robert and Michelle King were being driven from Manhattan to Connecticut, to film “ Evil,” their irreverent spiritual-horror series on CBS, they described the day they accidentally got engaged. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
