TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

Kingdom Hospital was the short-lived, Stephen King penned television series that aired back in 2004 (or rather, Stephen King American adaptation of Danish miniseries “The Kingdom” penned by Lars von Trier). This is another case where I missed the first episode. I tried to watch the second episode but there were so many seemingly random things going on that it just wasn’t worth it. I figured that I missed way too much set-up in the first episode and if I saw it from the beginning things would make more sense.

I figured wrong.

As it turned out, Stephen King’s adaptation could have simply been titled “f*cked up fever dreams Stephen King had when he was in the hospital following his accident with as many inside references to his own works as he could fit in to a 13-episode series.” Surprisingly enough, this doesn’t work as well as you’d think.

The premise gives us a hospital, named Kingdom Hospital, in Lewiston, Maine. As it turns out, the hospital was built on top of an old, burned down hospital which which itself was built on top of an old, burned down textile factory. A group of children were caught in textile factory’s basement in the fire and died. As we all know, when children die on a site in a King novel, the site is poisoned forever.

As a fan of King’s works for a very long time, I have a feeling the series was written with people like me in mind… the problem is that a lot of the standard King archetypes work better in print because when you see them in reality they really seem kind of dumb. The crazy psychic old lady that no one listens to, the psychic people with Down’s syndrome, the creepy little ghost kid, the poisoned site: all of these things can be seen in various King works. They certainly don’t seem to work as well on the screen. I think there’s a reason for that: the picture that your mind paints when you’re reading about these supernatural things is invariably more realistic than what you can reproduce on the screen with a television budget. Think about King’s best “to screen” translations. Carrie, Cujo, and Pet Sematary were all very simple psychological thrillers. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Misery didn’t really involve special effects. Think about some of the worst. It did not translate. Neither version of Salem’s Lot really translated. Maybe on the drawing board a scary monster anteater named Anubis sounded like a good idea but it really didn’t work for me.

Of course, maybe a lot of that could have been saved with a solid storyline that covered all the episodes. We’ll never know as this one really didn’t. At one point the people in the ER break in to song and no one really mentions why. Later a lawyer is admitted and either he is having a dream about people forcing him to sign waivers during a heart attack or the people are actually doing it. In another scene, the anteater rips the lawyer’s heart out of his chest and we never see him again. I’m assuming he died but we don’t really know.

And, if nothing else proves that it was an extending chance for King to just do what he felt like: there was an entire episode based around the hospital “setting right” the Buckner play from the 1986 World Series. In the episode, “Buckner” was brought in to the hospital and given the chance to travel back in time and fix his mistake. If that wasn’t enough, the fact that the hospital gave him the chance to travel back in time was never really addressed.

All said, the entire series was a mess. Nothing led to anything else. Character’s jump in between the real world and the in-between with no real explanation. King fans used a lot of explanations for why this show didn’t catch on. People didn’t “get it”. They broke it up and aired the episode after long breaks. It was none of that. It just wasn’t that logical or good a show.

Recommendation to avoid. Up next: Battlestar!