“I’ve held onto it the way you hold on to something you love,” King, 73, said last month by phone.Īs in many King stories, a linchpin of “Lisey’s Story” is mental illness. So he did: King wrote the entire series, something he hadn’t done for a TV series adaptation of one of his own novels since he wrote the ABC mini-series version of “The Shining” (1997). King has said that the novel is one of his favorites, and one that he would want to adapt himself. In recent years, there have been a string of glossy TV adaptations of King’s works, including “The Outsider,” “Under the Dome” and “The Mist.” But “Lisey’s Story” is different. But it’s also menacing terrain, where cloaked figures sit silently inside a massive amphitheater awaiting resolutions to earthly traumas. Julianne Moore stars as Lisey Landon, the widow of Scott Landon, a famous novelist (played by Clive Owen) whose childhood traumas drove him to forge a connection to a transdimensional world called Boo’ya Moon.Īs vividly depicted in the show, Boo’ya Moon is a place of tranquil beauty, like a Pre-Raphaelite wonderland.

But it's entertaining enough to keep you watching and see what happens next.Alone, but not: It’s a theme that courses through King’s sweeping body of work, and it returns for several characters across layers of time and space in “Lisey’s Story,” which begins Friday on Apple TV+. It's too bad then that 11.22.63 never quite reaches their level of collective excellence. Hulu has produced original series before but never on this scale, and, at least thematically, the result feels a lot like the love child of Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, and Groundhog Day. Abrams (such as a Nixon campaign sign that reads, 'They can't lick our Dick!') help add some much-needed comic relief to the story's dark, weighty themes.

But Franco's convincing performance somehow makes it all seem strangely plausible, and clever touches from director J.J. The story's semi-preposterous rules for time travel aren't big selling points (among them, the portal takes you to the exact same spot at the exact same time - Oct. And in the end it does, thanks to solid acting and some incredibly convenient plot points. This ambitious adaptation of Stephen King's novel sets out to achieve a lot in only eight episodes.

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