Richard Price goes inside Stephen King’s ‘Outsider’
PASADENA, Calif. – The works of Stephen King have been adapted for film and television so many times, you may think you know exactly what a King TV show would look like.
HBO’s new miniseries “The Outsider” (Sundays, 9 EST/PST) is based on King’s 2018 novel, and is a distinctive take on the author’s work. Created by Richard Price (“The Night Of”) and partially directed by Jason Bateman, who co-stars, “Outsider” starts out like a “True Detective”-style murder mystery. A horrible crime has occurred and a weathered detective is out for justice. But slowly, over the course of the series, starting in Sunday’s second installment, supernatural elements creep into the story.
“I’m not a huge sort of horror fan or a scare-jump-gore-slasher-kind of audience member,” Bateman told reporters at the Television Critics Association this week. “So I was really excited that this story lived in more of a Stephen King ‘Shining’ world as opposed to some of his other great stories that live more in that sort of frightening, scare, shock world.”
Set in a small Georgia town, “Outsider” follows the investigation of the murder of a young boy. Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) arrests Terry Maitland (Bateman), the local high school baseball coach, after overwhelming physical evidence connects him to the crime. But soon the defense unearths footage that shows Terry was 60 miles away at the time the boy was killed. The new evidence forces Ralph to consider something supernatural may have occurred, a theory supported by Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), an outside investigator looking into the case.
“Stephen King, he gives you a good story and good characters, but a book is not a teleplay,” Price said, noting he adapted the story liberally. “It (starts) out like a police procedural ... but then it sort of started to glide into the supernatural.”
Erivo, an Oscar nominee for last year’s “Harriet,” was interested in seeing the slightly strange character of Holly as a woman of color.
“I knew that there was an oddity about her, and I was intrigued by the fact that, as a woman of color, you never really get to see these kind of women on screen,” she said. “So I wanted to make sure that she was fully human, very much in charge, and that you got to know her as you met her in each episode.”
Although Holly appears in other King novels and the “Mr. Mercedes” TV series, the role in HBO’s project stands alone.
“‘Mr. Mercedes’ did not exist in the world of ‘The Outsider,’ ” Price said. “Forget everything you knew about Holly. That that was that Holly. This is my Holly. And I asked King if I could at least change her name just to make more of a separation, and the only thing he ever said in terms of a directive to me was just keep the name Holly Gibney. I said, ‘Fine.’ ”