Review: HBO’s The Outsider gives Stephen King the prestige TV treatment

Despite being one of the best-selling and most influential authors of our era, Stephen King’s works have rarely translated well to the screen. With a few exceptions over the years (The Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, and most recently the underrated Doctor Sleep), many of the numerous movie and TV takes on King’s stories often fall flat, losing that essential balance King maintains between deep character studies and supernatural horror.

HBO’s The Outsider gets King right. Based on King’s 2018 novel, The Outsider is a gritty procedural with a supernatural twist, which is sure to draw comparisons to HBO’s own True Detective. Both shows deal with unlikely protagonists teaming up to investigate horrific crimes in the southern US, but The Outsider very much stands on its own as a grim story about evil lurking where we least expect it.

The Outsider begins with the discovery of the mutilated body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson (Duncan E. Clark) in rural Georgia. His chest has been torn apart, and eyewitnesses point to Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), the town’s little league coach as the perpetrator. Witnessed spot him walking around covered in blood, and driving around with Frankie in a rented van with out of state plate before his disappearance. Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) makes the decision to arrest Terry in the middle of a little league game, in full view of the entire town, in order to send a message that the perpetrator of the horrific crime had been discovered. After all, it seems to be an open and shut case; in addition to the numerous witnesses, Terry’s fingerprints are all over the van and Frankie’s body. But matters become more complicated when Terry’s lawyer Howie Gold (Bill Camp) produces video evidence that shows Terry was 50 miles away at a convention when Frankie was murdered; how could Terry have been in two places at the same time? And if Terry didn’t kill Frankie, then who did? And are they still at large?

In order to help with the mystery, the team brings in private investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) to work on the case. Able to retain huge swaths of information, Gibney has few people skills. She’s intensely awkward and speaks in a clipped, matter-of-fact manner. After meeting with Terry’s wife Jeannie (Mare Winningham) and his children, Gibeny begins to suspect a potentially supernatural connection that extends far from Terry Maitland, and strains the belief of both Terry’s defenders and Detective Anderson and his team.

HBO provided the first six episodes of the show for review (the first two air tonight), and it’s an engrossing watch. Jason Bateman directed the first two episodes, and they do a great job of slowly leaning into the horrific case while allowing time for viewers to get a solid grasp on the numerous characters at play. This is a show that takes its time; some may find the pacing too drawn out, and it does suffer from that infuriating “prestige TV” characteristic where characters speak incredibly slowly and under their breath, which leads to some furious remote control volume adjustments when the evocative and tense score by Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans kicks in.

Veteran TV writer Richard Price (The Wire, The Night Of) slowly teases out the central mystery just enough to keep viewers hooked for the next episode, but never short-changes the central characters, which offers ample time for the performances to shine, from Ben Mendleson’s haunting portrayal as the Detective at the heart of this seemingly unsolvable mystery to Cynthia Revo’s restrained take on the socially-awkward Holly Gibney, who’s tasked with offering up a mystical explanation that no one else seems ready to take seriously.

The Outsider gets the creepy atmosphere of Stephen King’s book down pat and allows viewers time to see how the effects of such a brutal crime spread throughout the small-town (and even further, as the series progresses). No one in the community is spared when a crime like this is committed, which just might be the scariest takeaway from this chilling series.

The Outsider airs Sundays at 9:00 pm EST on HBO.