One of the best Stephen King adaptations in recent years is AT&T’s Mr. Mercedes, due in no small part to the talented TV writers — David E. Kelley and Denis Lehane among them — who have reshaped the story into a satisfying procedural-horror hybrid. That approach is in play in HBO’s newest series, The Outsider, a supernatural thriller based on the King novel of the same name. But this isn’t any run-of-the-mill adaptation of King’s written word, rather the series (or miniseries) was conceived and developed by author Richard Price. That distinction places the series in or very near the realm of prestige television, and, despite its otherwise B-movie credentials, has gifted it with an absurdly talented cast, including Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo, Paddy Considine, Mare Winningham, Jeremy Bobb, Bill Camp, and Jason Bateman (who also directed the first two episodes).
In essence, Price has crafted an unusual thriller, one that puts a premium on the investigative aspect of a horrific string of child murders, but also makes plenty of time to explore more contemplative elements like grief and trauma amid well-founded character work not often seen in this neck of the genre woods. Or at least not at this level. When you consider Price has lent his talents to the likes of The Wire, The Deuce, and The Night Of, it’s no surprise that The Outsider is a meticulously crafted crime story. But the additional element of a literally faceless, supernatural killer at the center of an otherwise grounded and occasionally harrowing story of murder and the emotional fallout surrounding it, pushes Price into new territory.
Those expecting a more traditional monster-centric horror story will likely be left a little cold by this admittedly chilly series. Though The Outsider introduces the possibility of a supernatural presence early on, that entity is shuffled into the background for much of the first half of the season. This affords Price, Bateman, and the rest of the cast an opportunity to focus on the bizarre circumstances of a brutal child-killing, one that implicates Bateman’s Terry Maitland with an orgy of evidence implicating him as the party responsible. A wrinkle presents itself, however, when a video of Terry at a conference surfaces, placing him nearly 100 miles away at the time of the boy’s death. This does little to sway the opinion of the public or detective Ralph Anderson (Mendelsohn), whose ire over the child’s death — ignited by the lingering grief over the passing of his own child sometime earlier — leads him to make a spectacle of Terry’s arrest.
What marks the first half of the season, then, is the degree to which The Outsider lingers on the psychological and moral fallout of not just the boy’s gruesome murder, but also what happens to Terry and, subsequently, his wife, Glory (Julianne Nicholson), and their two young daughters. The hasty and deliberately unfulfilling adjudication of Terry’s case becomes an early turning point for Ralph, who rededicates himself to the investigation by teaming with Terry’s lawyer, Howie Gold (Bill Camp), his investigator Alec Pelley (Jeremy Bobb), and the unusual, but unusually effective co-investigator, Holly Gibney (the always terrific Cynthia Erivo).
Once the series introduces Holly, The Outsider begins to slowly peel away at the layers of its own commitment to reality, revealing more and more of its supernatural underpinnings. Though it takes its time getting there, the series is anything but languorous. Instead, it is a gripping procedural that feels very much born of the mind of Richard Price. King’s influence remains, but mostly as seasoning to what is an otherwise somber and purposefully paced narrative that offers excellent character work for its cast, and gradually build into a genuinely satisfying murder mystery that reaches well beyond the scope of the natural world.
The restrained buildup to that revelation is amplified by the series' visual aesthetics — a mostly gray, drab palette combined with details that are occasionally literally out of focus — which is established early on by Bateman, who is clearly drawing from the Emmy Award-winning bag of tricks he employed on Ozark. As the series progresses, however, those choices inform on many of the themes running through the story, the faceless inscrutability of the killer and of grief itself. This, in turn, gives The Outsider a chance to act as more of a character study than as a plot-driven supernatural thriller — though later episodes move very close to becoming just that.
In essence, Price, Bateman, and the series’s terrific cast combine to make a Stephen King adaptation that less interested in being a Stephen King adaptation (as the best film and TV shows of the author’s work often are), and more interested in figuring out how best to translate a dark, eerie tale into a engrossing television procedural. The end result is an unlikely success that steps out of one genre to situate itself firmly in another.
The Outsider premieres Sunday, January 12 @9pm on HBO.