TV Review: The Outsider
HBO’s The Outsider is a Bone-chilling Adaptation of a Stephen King Story
HBO’s new series, The Outsider, continues Stephen King’s onscreen renaissance with a harrowing adaptation of the celebrated author’s novel. Given a prestige drama sheen, the show operates as an unflinching detective story full of twists and turns, bolstered by an all-star cast. Ben Mendelsohn and Jason Bateman both shine in their respective roles as Ralph Anderson and Terry Maitland, navigating a whirlwind of grief, horror, and a touch of the supernatural. Four episodes watched for review. Minor spoilers ahead…
The Outsider opens with the gruesome discovery of a mutilated corpse - that of a young boy. As a pair of detectives uncover the bloody scene and the child’s half-eaten remains, one asks, “Animal?” The other offers a chilling response: “No.” This simple exchange sets the tone for HBO’s latest crime thriller, adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name. On its surface, The Outsider seems to share similar DNA with the premium network’s other police thriller, True Detective; however, where True Detective’s draw lies in the esoteric charms of “time is a flat circle” and its alluring murder mystery, The Outsider is simply a dark paradox, a puzzle box enigma that begs to ask the question: What the hell is going on?
It would be misleading to categorize The Outsider as a whodunnit, because the show points an irrefutable finger at the most likely culprit within the first 20 minutes of the first episode: Georgian family man and the town’s little league coach, Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman). The evidence stacked against Maitland is staggering: multiple eyewitness accounts identify him by name and remember him being covered in blood, his fingerprints are all over the boy’s corpse, and a van recovered from the scene is teeming with incriminating DNA. And as Maitland maintains his innocence, the arresting detective, Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn, finally breaking out of his villainous typecasting), brings the case to the district attorney as a “gold-plated slam dunk.” What seems to be an open-and-shut case, however, is anything but. Despite the mountain of damning evidence piled against Maitland, he has an airtight alibi - backed by clear video footage - placing him at a teacher’s conference 70 miles away at the exact time of the boy’s murder. The question then becomes: How can someone be in two places at the same time?
“
More The Colorado Kid than It, there is a distinct pleasure in The Outsider’s procedural grit, especially when it comes to its screen adaptation.”
More The Colorado Kid than It, there is a distinct pleasure in The Outsider’s procedural grit, especially when it comes to its screen adaptation. Ben Mendelsohn is particularly great as the lead, portraying detective Ralph Anderson as a fully formed character steeped in a real humanity - his competencies, his biases, and his damaged tenderness all find a way to the surface in an engrossing and complex performance. Jason Bateman is also fantastic in the role of Terry Maitland, elevating his everyman-out-of-his-depth schtick to a new level. However, The Outsider fires on all cylinders whenever the two are on screen together, and their relationship comes to a head early in the season in a moving confrontation that brings out the best in both players.
With a small town in spiral and a festering evil that seems to be around every corner, The Outsider is extraordinarily proficient at weaponizing its grim atmosphere. The first two episodes in particular give rise to some nasty twists and swerves that, while clearly engineered to keep audiences guessing, fit right in with the narrative world-building that creator Richard Price has fostered. Make no mistake, The Outsider is dark; at times the show feels cruelly hopeless, but it never veers fully into unsavory misery porn territory. The introduction of Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo, coming off an Oscar nomination for Harriet) in the third episode adds some much needed pop against the show’s dark storytelling. A recurring stalwart of the Stephen King universe, Gibney is an eccentric PI that has a knack for deciphering the unknowable and using her encyclopedic knowledge to solve crimes. Erivo is a great addition to the cast, playing up the character’s lack of social graces while also shouldering much of the show’s captivating detective work.
The Outsider continues the streak of Stephen King adaptations in strong fashion, especially after a series of 2019 critical failures that was Pet Sematary, It Chapter Two, and In the Tall Grass. It seems that HBO’s prestige stage is a perfect fit for a middle-of-the-road King property; buoyed by a fantastic cast and an intoxicatingly dark atmosphere, The Outsider is one of the best translations of the horror author’s works in a long while.
