I’m five episodes into showrunner Richard Price’s miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider on HBO. The premium channel is clearly looking to profit off the southern gothic whodunnit premise and aesthetic of its first season of True Detective as well as its own Sharp Objects miniseries. When a young boy is brutally murdered in a small town, the local baseball coach (Jason Bateman) is arrested for the crime despite being in another state when the murder occurred. Everything about the series indicates craftsmanship from the meticulous cinematography to the abnormally exceptional cast (Ben Mendelsohn, Bateman, Julianne Nicholson, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, and Yul Vazquez), but this is a Stephen King adaptation so with that comes a supernatural doppelgänger premise that worked in a postmodern show like Twin Peaks, but only the remaining episodes of The Outsider will reveal if Price and company can pull the premise off in a more straightforward and earnest show such as this one.
