In January, HBO is joining the Stephen King adaptation renaissance with a new series, The Outsider. The network released a new trailer for the series yesterday, showing off a creepy mystery in which a man is arrested for the death of a young boy.
In the trailer, we watch Terry Maitland (played by Jason Bateman), is arrested for the death of a child, and Detective Ralph Anderson (played by Ben Mendelsohn), is baffled by the conflicting evidence of the case. On one hand, Maitland’s prints were at the crime scene. On the other, he was seen 60 miles away, captured on video cameras at the same time the murder occurred.
While Anderson tries to piece together what happened, a private investigator named Holly Gibney (played by Cynthia Erivo), also begins looking into the case, and discovers that there are some strange occurrences and coincidences, which point to some sort of otherworldly explanation.
The series is based on King’s 2018 novel The Outsider, which is set after his Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch), and which included Gibney as a character.
https://reactormag.com/2018/05/22/book-reviews-the-outsider-by-stephen-king/
The series will debut on January 12th, 2020, and it comes at a good time: HBO’s Watchmen and His Dark Materials will have ended, and with no future seasons of True Detective on the horizon, this seems like it’ll be a good mystery to sink into.
I’ll admit I’m struggling to deal with a different actor playing Holly after getting used to Justin Lupe on Mr Mercedes. I was kind of hoping that if they did The Outsider they’d somehow tie it into the same continuity, although of course the TV series has gone in a pretty different direction to the books.
Still, I enjoyed the book so I’m sure I’ll like this too.
I’ll definitely watch this. I used to love Stephen King when I was a kid and for many years I read everything he ever wrote up to that point in time. Then I stopped reading him for a several years, but I’ve recently gone back and read some of the novels I’d missed. A couple of months ago I read “The Outsider” without knowing anything about it in advance and I liked it enough that I went and read the Bill Hodges trilogy, which I also enjoyed. I’m intrigued to see how close to the novel the TV series will be, but I’m happy that Terry Matiland is played by Jason Bateman and Ralph Anderson by Ben Mendelsohn. They’re good actors, and they seem a good fit for the characters. After reading the books I started watching the Mr. Mercedes TV series,and I have to say that like the girl that plays Holly Gibney there, so I’m surprised to see how different the character seems to be in this one since the article says she’s a P.I. working the case in parallel to Ralph, which isn’t exactly what happens in the book and seems a bit out of character for Holly, but we’ll see how it plays out.