Watching The Outsider for the first time with my girlfriend, I often referred to it feeling like “Diet It” or “It Lite with a dash of Salem’s Lot,” but I never meant it as a crack on the quality or to dismiss it as derivative—it’s simply not quite as long as either of those early King stories.
More than any adaptation I’ve seen, The Outsider feels like a Stephen King novel—and I don’t just mean in terms of specific details it lifts from the book. I mean that the experience of watching The Outsider feels as much like the experience of reading a King novel that any screen retelling ever could.
The episodes begin like King chapters begin and, more importantly, end like they end. The final moments of “Tigers and Bears,” the penultimate episode, feels so much like finishing a chapter of a Stephen King novel—the brilliant way he has of ending the precise millisecond the proverbial sh*t hits the fan and leaving you shocked, angry, dismayed, and ravenous for more all at once—if I’d opened my eyes and looked down to find an actual copy of It or Salem’s Lot in my hand, I don’t know that I would’ve been very surprised.
I’ve never had that experience watching a King adaptation, and now that I have, I cherish it. That’s not even necessarily commentary on the quality. There are wonderful King adaptations like Misery, The Shining, The Stand, and more but none of them have captured the actual act of reading a King book like The Outsider.
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