‘Different road’
Director Jack Bender takes a new turn in second season of ‘Mr. Mercedes’
Jack Bender has been in the director’s chair for many productions over the course of his career.
From “Under the Dome” to “Game of Thrones” to “The Sopranos” and “Lost,” Bender has taken a vision to TV screens.
His latest project is the Audience Network original series “Mr. Mercedes,” which began airing its second season on Aug. 22. New episodes air at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on DirecTV.
“Mr. Mercedes” is based on Stephen King’s trilogy of books following detective Bill Hodges. During the first season, Bender worked with Santa Fe-based producer Tony Mark.
The second season picks up a year after Brady Hartsfield’s thwarted attempt to perpetrate a second mass murder in Bridgton, Ohio. Since the incident, Hartsfield has been hospitalized in a vegetative state.
Retired detective Bill Hodges has done his best to move on from his Brady obsession, teaming up with Holly Gibney to open Finders Keepers, a private investigative agency.
But when unexplainable occurrences begin to affect hospital staff members attending to Hartsfield, Hodges is haunted by the feeling that Hartsfield is somehow responsible.
“We definitely take a different road,” Bender says in a recent interview. “We have the same passengers in the car, and we’re going to believe the world they are in. It takes some turns that Season 1 didn’t. We go a little more into the Stephen Kingdom. I feel like we did a great job at getting the story told in a strong way.”
Bender got to know King while he was working on “Lost” and then worked his way to the first two seasons of “Under the Dome.”
“When I left that, Stephen and I were talking about what we could do together,” he says. “He admires my work, and we were talking about various projects of his. Then one day, I got in the mail the galleys of his new book ‘Mr. Mercedes.’ I was thrilled, and what I loved about it was that he was writing a detective drama where the haunted comes back into the detective’s life.”
Bender says the novel was character-driven, which piqued his interest.
“This train wreck of a guy who let himself go,” he says. “At first, I thought, it could be a movie. Then the idea came to me of doing it as a classy cable show. We could spend time with the characters. This is why TV is attracting so many great storytellers.”