There’s equally compelling evidence that Maitland was at a teacher’s conference in another town when the murder was committed. The detective in charge, Ralph Anderson (Mendelsohn), arrests Maitland quickly and publicly because of the crime’s brutality but primarily because the evidence against him - fingerprints, multiple witnesses, surveillance footage - is so overwhelming.īut as quickly as it came together, the case begins to fall apart. Show and book both begin with the discovery of the body of an 11-year-old boy, horrifically murdered, and move directly to the arrest of a solid local citizen, Terry Maitland (Bateman), while he’s coaching a youth baseball game. (Bateman directed the first two episodes.) It takes King’s spooky, jokey, thinly characterized plot machine and turns it into a psychological workout. It doubles down on a kind of blue-tinged moodiness that’s a popular mode in television mystery these days, from “The Sinner” on USA to Price’s “The Night Of” for HBO. In HBO’s “Outsider” the camera slowly glides, or creeps, or just sits still while actors try out their hard or perplexed or grieving stares. Is it an improvement? Having just read the book, I missed King’s energy and earnestness, and most of all his sense of relentless forward motion. It’s “The Outsider” dipped in noir sauce and coated in HBO-prestige bread crumbs. Based on the first six episodes, they’ve gloomed it up and slowed it down, keeping much of the basic story but making something radically different in tone and atmosphere. Presumably the writer Richard Price and the actor and producer Jason Bateman, two of the main forces behind the 10-episode adaptation of “The Outsider” that begins Sunday on HBO, liked the book. Others think the villain just isn’t scary enough. Some people are turned off by the way it segues from police procedural mystery to supernatural skirmish. If you look up rankings of his novels, it tends to come in around the midpoint at best and often much lower. “The Outsider” is not generally considered to be really top-flight Stephen King.

Stephen king the outsider review