It’s a widely agreed-upon opinion that, save for a handful of notable exceptions (The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, etc.), Stephen King adaptations tend to have a fairly low rate of success. This has been especially true when it comes to television adaptations, despite the fact that a serialized approach seems like it would make more sense for King’s sprawling works of fiction. (Look no further than the recently canceled Under the Dome to that point.)
Despite all that, there have been high hopes for Hulu’s adaptation of 11.22.63, King’s magnum opus about a man who goes back in time to stop the JFK assassination, due in part to J.J. Abrams’ involvement as executive producer, as well as the excellent source material. And yet, 11.22.63 doesn’t completely hit the mark. Which is not to say it necessarily falls flat, either. There’s a lot of good to be found in Hulu’s miniseries, as long as you’re willing to take the bad along with it.
The series doesn’t waste time with exposition or groundwork before jumping right into the meat of the story. James Franco stars as Jake Epping, a thirty-something high school English teacher and brand new divorcee. We know this because, in the opening scene of the first episode, Jake’s estranged wife meets him at the diner owned by his buddy Al (Chris Cooper) — who ribs Jake about eating the greasy food he serves — to sign their divorce papers. But then, only moments after saying goodbye to Jake’s now ex-wife, Al emerges from the back looking years older and worse for wear despite only having been gone for a few minutes. And does Al ever have the tale to tell.
In the storage closet of his diner, Al discovered a rabbit hole that takes you back to October 21, 1960. For years, he’d been using it to go back in time to purchase cheap meat for the hamburgers he sells at his diner. Eventually, however, he decided to get more ambitious and use the time portal to go back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Al reasons that preventing the assassination would cause a butterfly effect that would in turn spare Kennedy’s brother Robert and prevent the Vietnam war from happening, thus making the world an overall better place.
The only problem is that the past doesn’t want to be changed, resisting meddling in ways both subtle and overt. Al, for instance, developed cancer before he was able to complete his mission, and therefore needs Jake to do “what he couldn’t do.” There’s the first problem with 11.22.63. It’s difficult enough as it is to reason that a man would sacrifice years of his life to jump into such a hare-brained mission, and James Franco ain’t exactly selling it. Aside from the fact that all we know about Jake Epping is that he’s a divorced English teacher (who recently lost his father, as we also learn in the brief encounter with his ex), there’s nothing about the character that would suggest such a leap of faith, and Franco portrays Jake with a mix of stupefied disbelief and indignant outrage at what he’s being asked to do.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only time the viewer is asked to suspend disbelief. After a series of initial events that nearly make him abandon his mission for good, Jake befriends an unlikely ally, a young man named Bill Turcotte (George MacKay) who agrees to help after the two prevent the man who killed Turcotte’s sister from murdering his wife and kids — an incident that left the janitor of Jake’s high school in 2016 an orphan. If Jake’s leap of faith is unlikely enough as it is, it’s hard to believe that someone would blindly follow the mission of a complete stranger who claims to be from the future. Likewise, when Jake eventually meets the love interest, a school librarian named Sadie (Sarah Gadon), he immediately falls for her without question, despite the fact that, in doing so, he compromises his mission.
The series is at its best when it closely follows the source material, and gripes aside, it moves at a thrilling pace once all of the chess pieces have been laid out and the motivating factors have been established. The supporting cast is excellent. MacKay is heartbreaking at times as the unappreciated sidekick left to do most of the heavy lifting (both the character and the actor), Gadon is radiant as Sadie, and Daniel Webber nails the part of the psychotic and abusive Lee Harvey Oswald. The show’s also worth watching for the cinematography alone, which flawlessly captures the era in rose-colored perfection.
11.22.63 is a good show. Its main flaw is that it’s not a great show, because the potential was definitely there. An otherwise well-realized adaptation ultimately suffers from too many departures that feel shoehorned in — from “the past” at one point sending an army of cockroaches to stop Jake, to Jake inadvertently befriending the very man he had come to stop from murdering his family. Meanwhile, other parts of the story have been left to suffer as a result. It’s never made clear, for instance, why Sadie is so important to Jake that he’s willing to jeopardize the future for her. And unfortunately while Franco looks great in a suit, he brings little more to the project than the shiny, candy-colored Fords and Chevys milling around in the background. Still, the integrity of King’s work stays mostly intact, however, down to the twist ending that’s been altered in head-scratching ways. Like the book, it’s a series haunted by a sense that the past, even if it can be changed, is better off left alone, a point it keeps finding haunting ways to drive home.
“The Rabbit Hole,” the first episode of 11.22.63, is available on Hulu today.
