The Outsider (2020)

Mendelsohn, in particular, is spectacular. ... The Outsider feels different. It feels fresh. It feels unique. It feels like a side of King’s Dominion we haven’t really seen on screen before, and that’s good news for Constant Readers and for HBO.

Its writers and directors massage the tale’s foreboding evenly and with skill, although it takes about three episodes to get it moving. ... Fortunately King’s stories live and breathe through his characters, their interior drives and quirks, which is where Cynthia Erivo’s Holly Gibney enters and almost singlehandedly picks up the inertia holding back “The Outsider” and kicks it loose.

The Outsider’s relative sprawl—10 hours to tackle a nearly 600-page book—affords unusual leeway and breathing room, which Price exploits with intelligence and deft creativity. It also helps that the cast is uniformly excellent.

Given the wildness of the story, The Outsider sometimes feels ludicrously tony, but it’s undeniably gripping—a beach read rendered by real artists. The series is so clever that it might take you a while to realize that it’s essentially Dracula. ... Or, perhaps even more fitting, The Outsider suggests a merging of Kolchak with Price’s The Night Of.

The details pile up, but intrigue fails to mount.

It's a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another's work.

The performers — also including Mare Winningham as Ralph’s wife, Julianne Nicholson as Terry’s wife, and The Night Of‘s Bill Camp as a local lawyer — are all strong, but in service of storytelling that doesn’t always deserve them. Imagine the more overheated aspects of True Detective, but with more blatant nods to demons and far less impressive visuals.

!!!!It's fantastic! Love the eeriness, dread, acting, styling, and story! This is a on a short list of great Stephen King adaptations.

HBO's The Outsider started off as a really interesting, exciting re-invention of Dracula, but was ultimately weighed down by it's tortoise-like pace after the 2nd episode. With an excellent cast, the mini-series would have been better if edited down to 7 episodes instead of dragging out repeated conversations, character thought processes and the continual use of car driving scenes to forward momentum. The finale was equally disappointing and reminded me of how I felt after watching the original mini-series of IT.

The first couple of episodes were great and the detective lady is an interesting character but the show nosedives pretty quickly after that with a bunch of useless characters, boring dialogue and a meandering plot. It's funny how the TV medium exposes how **** and formulaic Stephen King's dialogue can be (not always, but here it's pretty bad), with every character talking the same and always bringing up boring anecdotes with completely unearned gravitas etc.

The first episode hooks you but the rest of the episodes are extremely slow pace, cliche, unrelatable characters and way too long.

Wow. The first 2 episodes were a 9 out of 10. Then, the rest is ridiculous. This is a 5, maybe 6 episode story that they milk for 10 episodes. I mean milk, and cream, and cheese and every dairy product out there. Jason Bateman is great. The ending is anti-climactic and really not worth the time.