One of my favorite artistic pastimes:

When a movie takes a subject matter customarily deemed to be mundane, and then injects it with and within genre structures to make a case for the subject matter’s comfortable fit in such elevated genre terrain.

The Lost King has all the hallmarks of an investigative procedural. The primary difference: it swaps out the detective for a historian.

What’s considered blander than the process of researching history?

Exactly.

And yet, audiences LAP UP Law & Order as absolutely riveting.

Solving a legal crime or contemporary mystery might be sexier than uncovering lost history, but the process looks and feels mighty similar in The Lost King (…with juxtaposed differences).