I like Stephen King. Yes, he has a penchant for redundancy,
but the dude knows how to tell a story, even if it seldom translates to the big
(or small) screen. King has a knack for creating and fleshing out interesting
characters who are bombarded with one horrific incident after another amidst
particularly sinister settings, his fast-paced prose deftly revealing the
innermost thoughts and feelings of said characters in a way that puts you right
there with them. This intimacy is noticeably absent from film and TV
adaptations, which have the tendency to come off as cold and detached, the hair-raising
moments and creepy details cheesy to the point of being comical, and the characters
(or really, the actors who play them), hard to like and their seemingly vague motivations
difficult to understand. Prime example: ABC’s sad, made-for-TV attempt of Desperation, an intriguing tale about a desert
town in Nevada,
its enormous, recently haunted mining pit, and the unlucky group of folks who
get caught up in a battle of good versus evil while trying to pass through.
My point? I recently received a flyer for TNT’s four-week
television event, Nightmares and
Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, in which eight stories from
the book are produced as an eight-part mini-series. The quality is questionable
for sure, but I’ve heard moderately good things about the TNT remake of Salem’s Lot. Plus, Nightmares and Dreamscapes boasts a rather respectable cast —
William H. Macy, Ron Livingston, Samantha Mathis, Kim Delany, William Hurt and
Tom Berenger, to name a few — and TNT graciously sent senior writer/editor
Eric Snider a preview package, which I’m snagging from him ASAP so as to find
out whether or not to invest my attention. Stay tuned — if it’s decent enough,
I’ll be previewing the series for its July 12 premiere.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.