HBO's 10-Part Stephen King Masterpiece Deserves Kudos For Avoiding A Common Adaptation Mistake

Not only is one of HBO’s best Stephen King adaptations a classic psychological thriller, but the 2020 series deserves credit for avoiding a major mistake made by many earlier small-screen takes on the writer’s work. If Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror shows proved anything, it is that a great adaptation does not always necessarily need to be a faithful one.

In 2018, Flanagan turned Shirley Jackson’s intimate character study The Haunting of Hill House into a sprawling, generations-spanning epic family saga. In 2020, the writer/director transformed Henry James’s taut, ambiguous novella The Turn of the Screw into a more explicitly supernatural ghost story with a much more ambitious scope. In 2023, with his loosest adaptation yet, Flanagan blended together numerous Edgar Allan Poe short stories to create the riotous, gory horror comedy/ satire The Fall of the House of Usher.

All of these shows were huge hits, so their choice to stray far from their literal source material clearly paid off. However, it is interesting to note that Flanagan’s earlier sequel to The Shining, 2019’s Doctor Sleep, was much more divisive among critics. In contrast, 2016’s Hulu series 11.22.63 was a huge hit with critics, and that miniseries stuck much closer to the story of King’s 2011 novel of the same name. King’s books seem to fare particularly well with faithful adaptations, as evidenced by 2020’s HBO classic The Outsider.

HBO's The Outsider Is A Relatively Faithful Stephen King Adaptation

It is understandable that filmmakers want to reinvent King’s stories on the screen. After all, the writer’s most iconic adaptation to date, 1980’s The Shining, was massively altered by director Stanley Kubrick. However, not every filmmaker is Kubrick, and many King adaptations struggle thanks to the changes they make to their source material. Since The Outsider already has a complex plot, the HBO show was right to stick close to the existing story of King’s novel.

Both the show and the book begin with the arrest of Jason Bateman’s Terry Maitland, a well-liked Little League coach and pillar of his small-town community. Ben Mendelsohn’s detective Ralph Anderson is appalled by Terry’s horrific crime, but he is also certain that he has caught the right man. The Outsider’s ingenious plot starts with Ralph outlining all the incontestable evidence that places Terry at the scene of the crime, only for Terry to respond with equally undeniable proof that he was somewhere else entirely when the incident took place.

In the novel, readers are constantly tossed between Terry and Ralph’s perspectives for the first third of the novel, and left unsure where their loyalties lie. Fortunately, the creators of the HBO show kept this approach, even though a massive mid-story twist soon turns The Outsider into an entirely different sort of show. A less daring series would have revealed this twist earlier, but the HBO show was right to borrow the book’s patient pacing.

The Outsider Deserved Multiple Seasons Instead Of Being A Miniseries

The Outsider deserves kudos for steering clear of a frequent pitfall in King adaptations by sticking close to the source text. While the IT movies and HBO’s spinoff series Welcome to Derry were equally right to alter their source material, The Outsider was screen-ready in its original incarnation and, as such, the show was stronger for its faithful approach to the book.

That said, The Outsider did make one major mistake, and that was limiting its story to a single season. The show was originally set to receive a second season, but HBO passed on its renewal, meaning the later Holly Gibney novels Holly and Never Flinch, as well as the novella "If It Bleeds," have still never received a screen adaptation. This was particularly unfortunate since HBO’s The Outsider clearly had potential as an ongoing series following Holly’s later cases.