5 King Books That Would Be Great TV

Here's a fun post from Brendon McCullin at Rock102online discussing 5 Stephen King books that would work as great television shows.  McCullin writes, "Television could use some more Stephen King."  Indeed!  

McCullin's list:
The Dark Tower
The Regulators
The Running Man
The Ten O'Clock People
Apt Pupil

Check out his reasoning.  What I like about his list is that it is so different.

My list:

  • The Mist.  Who needs an end?  Give us a season of battles between humans and the monsters coming from the mist!
  • The Regulators.  McCullin convinced me.  Seriously!
  • The Stand.
  • Fire Starter.  What happened to her?  
  • IT


Extra credit: Carrie.  See, just let every director  on earth have their shot at this thing.  A new one every week.

Give me your list.

7 comments:

  1. 11-23-63, the stand, Dolores Claiborne, and the cell (if he ever decided to actually freaking finish it)

    ReplyDelete
  2. OH MY! 11.22.63 is TOTALLY right on. I'm putting that on my list.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Funny thing is, I'm not really convinced, actually. I think there's a difference between tv series like McCullin is thinking of.

    King's books have beginnings, middles and final ends, and as such they won't work easily in any continuous, franchise form.

    ChrisC

    ReplyDelete
  4. Chris, King's books do have beginnings, middles and SOMETIMES they have ends. And sometimes, those ends are just loose ends. 11.22.63 would be an awesome 2 season series.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I admit a tv series can have a beginning middle and end, best case in point being Breaking Bad ( one of the most Shakespearian shows I've ever seen put on TV).

      The thing I worry about is something King once said in an EW article on Lost, here's his exact words:

      King: "The perfect critique of the old TV is offered in Rob Reiner's Stand By Me. Gordie Lachance asks his buds if they've ever noticed that the people on Wagon Train (an old '50s show) never seem to get anywhere. ''They just keep wagon-training,'' he says, clearly mystified. Of course he is. Gordie's going to grow up to be a writer, and even at age 12 he knows that stories should resemble life, and life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We grow, change, succeed, and fail; eventually we keel over dead, but we do not just keep on wagon-training.

      " All of the shows I've mentioned above acknowledge this fact. But they all also face a huge problem, a.k.a. the Prime Network Directive: Thou Shalt Not Kill the Cash Cow."

      This is the problem I was thinking of when I mentioned franchising. Admittedly, this could be construed as more of a literary judgment than anything else.

      Delete
  5. I think "Under the Dome" would make for a great series. Maybe they'll get around to actually adapting it one of these days...

    Apart from that, the obvious answers are "The Stand" and "It." I'd include "The Dark Tower," but the Jake problem muddies those waters big-time.

    The best idea, though, would be for a network -- let's say HBO -- to begin a series that is simply called something like "Stephen King Theatre." (It'd need a better title than that, but let's use it as a placeholder.) It could be devoted simply to adapting one King novel/story after another without having to run one story for multiple seasons.

    So, for example, season 1 could consist of 13 episodes adapting "Firestarter." Then, season 2 and season 3 could be "It." Season 4, "The Tommyknockers." Season 5? An anthology of various short stories. Seasons 6 and 7, "Desperation" and "The Regulators."

    This should happen.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I still think The Dark Tower could really work as a TV series. The only thing making me prefer a movie is that it's the lynchpin of King's universe, and therefore should be HUGE.

    But if it's a series of movies, the detail gets lost. I'd really like to see a Netflix series for both the Stand and the Dark Tower, with all the inter-relations therein.

    I thought about doing a series called "Stephen King's Maine: (fill in the blank)". One season could be Castle Rock, serializing stories like The Dark Half and Needful Things, while the next season could be Derry, taking on It and Insomnia, etc., etc., etc. Not sure how that could work.

    ReplyDelete