‘The Tommyknockers’

“I didn’t like it. I didn’t care for it at all,” King said of the 1993 TV adaptation of his 1987 science-fiction novel about the paranormal effects of a buried UFO on the residents of a small town. (He has similarly described the novel as “an awful book.”)

Jimmy Smits is “a fine actor,” King said, but as alcoholic poet Jim “Gard” Gardener, “he had to give a bunch of pretentious, portentous lines.” And at just over three hours, King felt the miniseries “should have been much longer.”

“It felt kind of cheap and thrown together,” he said. “I felt like they missed the sense of the book.”

King has never been shy about his preference for the 1997 TV version of “The Shining” over Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed 1980 movie adaptation of the 1977 novel, which follows an alcoholic teacher and playwright as he’s driven to madness and violence by a remote haunted hotel in the Colorado Rockies.

“Let’s put it this way — I dislike the film,” King said. “I always have. I admire the film, and I admire Kubrick as a director, which sometimes gets lost in the mix when people who absolutely love that film take me to task. I love Kubrick as a filmmaker, but I just felt that he didn’t have the chops for this particular thing.

“I don’t like the arc that Jack Nicholson runs as Jack Torrance,” he continued. “Because it isn’t really an arc — it’s a flat line. He’s crazy from the jump.”

King said Steven Weber, star of the ABC series, better grasped the character. “He knew what he was supposed to be doing: He was supposed to express love for his family, and that the hotel just gradually overwhelms his moral sense and his love for his family.”

King also praised Rebecca De Mornay’s performance as Wendy Torrance, which she “plays the way she’s written in the book,” as “the real reason I love that miniseries.”

“I ought to go back and watch it again,” he said.

‘Storm of the Century’

er direct-for-tv project, while recovering from his near-fatal road accident at the turn of the millennium. It aired in 2002.

“I was in a lot of pain, but I thought I’d love to do an homage to Shirley Jackson,” he remembers. The result was an effectsheavy, ghost-story miniseries on ABC in the spirit of Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House.”

The production encountered problems, including the death of actor David Dukes, and in the end, “I wasn’t delighted with the way it turned out,” King said.

“It didn’t have the bang that ‘Storm of the Century’ did,” he said. “Some of the acting was a bit … well, maybe it was the writing.”

‘Under the Dome’

“It was a sad thing, but it didn’t bother me,” King said. “I stopped watching after a while because I just didn’t give a (expletive).”

‘Mr. Mercedes’

“Mr. Mercedes” is a thrilling, genuinely scary adaptation of King’s series of recent crime novels about a retired Midwest detective taunted by a serial killer he was unable to catch during his career. Developed by AT&T’S somewhat obscure Audience Network, the series, which debuted in 2017, is not as widely known as some of the author’s other TV adaptations. King thinks that’s too bad.

“It was like we brought a stadium show to a coffee shop,” he said. “I liked it a lot, but nobody saw it.”

The show’s three seasons have recently been picked up by NBC (it has not yet been renewed for a fourth) and are streaming on its Peacock platform. “And thank God for that,” King said. “People are actually seeing it now.”

‘Castle Rock’

staging area to take some of my characters and — it might sound grand to call it this — the mythos,” King said of the series that debuted in 2018. “The people involved were big fans of those books, and I liked what they did quite a lot.”

Hulu canceled the series after two seasons — right when it was finding its rhythm, King argued.

“In the second season, they really got their feet under them,” he said. “I would have liked to have seen it go on and grow a little bit.”

‘The Stand’ (2020)

The new adaptation of “The Stand” on CBS All Access is much anticipated, and even King hasn’t seen the finished product.

“I’ve seen some rough cuts, and I can’t really give you an opinion yet except to say that it was interesting to see it brought to the 21st century and to see some of the changes that were made,” he said.

One clear improvement so far has to do with casting and diversity.

“The novel was very white. The miniseries was very white,” he said. “They have done a multicultural thing here, and that makes perfect sense.”

He also contributed a new ending — which he won’t reveal. “I always knew there was one more thing I had to say in that book, one more scene I wanted to write, and I finally did,” he said. “And I’m happy with it.”