The Outsider may be an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, but don’t expect the flashy special effects and showy moments of other recent King adaptions, such as It. HBO’s miniseries, despite its supernatural elements and mystic overtones, is grounded in the reality of a gritty crime thriller.
The Outsider’s story begins with the rape and slaying of an 11-year-old boy, Frankie Peterson, in Cherokee County, Georgia, a grisly event that throws the community into anguish. Before long, a raft of forensic evidence points to Terry Maitland, a beloved local Little League coach played by Jason Bateman, whose recent dramatic roles in shows such as Ozark have brought him far afield from his breakout role in the comedy series Arrested Development.
The problem, for the police, is that there is equally strong evidence that Maitland was 70 miles away around the time of the murder, speaking at an academic conference. How could a man be in two places at once? The question leads Detective Ralph Anderson, capably portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn, on a quest to discover the truth.
Along the way, Anderson enlists the help of private investigator Holly Gibney (Harriet’s Cynthia Erivo), a shy and brilliant polymath who can walk by a skyscraper, guess its height, and generally come within six inches of being right. Anderson searches for rational answers, but Gibney’s inquiry isn’t bound by traditional understandings of reality.
“The myth is, if it is a myth, that everyone in the world has an identical double,” she tells Anderson.
“If it’s a myth?” Anderson pushes back. “Because I have no tolerance for the unexplainable.”
But as Gibney begins to discover similarities between the death of Peterson and those of others elsewhere, we start to suspect that she’s onto something. Perhaps someone, or something, is spreading violence from person to person, like a contagion.
The possibility of such a thing isn’t that far-fetched. According to a 2018 study, mass shootings tend to spike after heavy media coverage of shootings. And indeed, The Outsider is clearly intended to take place in a world much like our own. Showrunner Richard Price has produced a supernatural thriller that is, in many ways, indistinguishable from a true-crime series, from the dour acting and dark colors of the sets to the graphic sequences of violence.
As other reviewers have noted, Price has altered the story from the novel, making it noticeably darker. In the book, Anderson’s own son is away at summer camp. In the TV series, he has died of cancer and continues to haunt the detective’s dreams. As terrifying as it is to find the body of a dead 11-year-old boy, the TV version of Anderson must live with the pain of his own loss as an additional motivation for solving the murder.
This edit to King’s storyline is perhaps unsurprising.
So much of today’s prestige television landscape puts the darker and more flawed parts of human nature under the microscope. We have Mad Men’s sexist egomaniacs, True Detective’s antihero Rust Cohle, and Breaking Bad’s high school science teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White. In some ways, these storylines are a necessary corrective to fluffy network sitcoms, in which everything is a joke and every problem can be solved with the right one-liner from a protagonist.
But in some ways, it would have been more rebellious if Price had decided to make Anderson character more optimistic and hopeful rather than less. Whereas it may have once been cutting-edge to make a show’s protagonist a self-loathing drunk who can’t crack a smile and who replies to any outside-the-box thinking with cynicism and scorn, it is now becoming cliché.
In the first six episodes of the 10-episode series, which is scheduled to run through March, we are presented a world in which a supernatural force is killing people through means we don’t entirely understand, framing innocent people in the process. But with the sour mood of the characters and overpowering depression and dread that permeates their world, we start to feel that even if they can vanquish the monster, their lives will barely improve.
In the year 1651, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In the four centuries since, we have indeed seen tragedies that made Hobbes seem prescient. But we’ve also seen miraculous inventions, brilliant works of art, and incredible acts of selflessness and solidarity.
In presenting its story of supernatural murder, The Outsider would have benefited from recognizing and embracing the duality of life, rather than fixating on its darker elements.
Zaid Jilani is the Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.