Universal City was on fire. OK, to use more literal terms, a section of the 230-acre back lot at NBC Universal Studios was on fire, but I like the first version for its metaphoric as well as prophetic import. After all, the place is actually named Universal City. And on a recent Sunday morning in June—the first day of the month, in fact, the official start of “June Gloom” in Los Angeles when the marine layer settles on portions of the city like a cataract—it went up in flames. Those who resent the fog will suffer the smoke. Or something like that. Or not.

I love a good sign as much as anyone, but given the frequency of fires in California these days, of both the wild, and in this case, not-so-wild variety, they seem to have about as much divine “signage” as a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. Besides, the timing and location of this particular conflagration didn’t suit my schedule so well, for I was days away from a six-week stint in L.A. on a new NBC show that had me bound, inevitably, for Universal City.

Funny how the fires lose what little luster they had in the first place when the most flammable thing of all is your paycheck.

Kings, a one-hour drama that sets the story of King David in a world parallel with our own, where Shiloh is a city that looks very much like contemporary New York, has been something of a godsend in the wake of this winter’s WGA strike. For not only is it that rarest of entities in this business, a show that shoots in New York and has its writers based there, too (you’d be surprised how often the writers on a show set in Manhattan are sitting in a room thousands of miles closer to Manhattan Beach); and not only did it come in the nick of time after the plug had been pulled on the other gig in town; it was a show so resonant with my sensibilities that on my best day I might have come up with it.

But I didn’t, and probably never would have anyway, and I can only be so grateful that its creator, Michael Green, decided to hire me. Little does he know that when he warned me in the interview that the job would require these initial six weeks in Los Angeles to get the writers room started while they edit the pilot, I was ready to move more than just my family. I was ready to move a mountain.

Now that I’m here in Universal City, my attempts to mine the metaphoric or prophetic import of the fact that across the street from the lot where the fire took place we are breaking stories for a show in which New York will double for a “meta Shiloh,” so to speak, all but have me lost in a certain hall of mirrors.

For it was there on that lot that a leftover set from the original King Kong was lit on fire years later to film the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. And new sets then built to double for Atlanta in the rest of that production were recycled over time for the sets on other productions, including Gotham City in the TV series, Batman. Along the way, a New York street scene used in numerous shows and films caught fire more than once, a 1990 incident reprised in this disaster of 2008 which also happened to destroy the animatronic Kong from a recent remake. One thing is certain: Universal City has more than earned its name.

And just as I’m trying to find my way out of the blazing hall of mirrors, I hear that the damage done last week has become a site on the Universal tram tour. Indeed if there is anything to attest to the ostensible invincibility of Universal City, it is photos of the fire burning in the background while in the foreground a set from War of the Worlds remains untouched, littered with the artificial wreckage of an imaginary catastrophe.

But then I learn something that keeps it all so real: as a means of backup storage for the copies of their enormous video vaults, the studios often use nothing other than mines of limestone and salt. I like to imagine that David would have done the same in his time, and the fact that some things really don’t change while everything else has changed is what sold me on Kings in the first place. I can’t wait to get back to Shiloh, the city where I live.