HBO's The Outsider Still Called Best Stephen King Series

Six years after it premiered, the Ben Mendelsohn and Cynthia Erivo miniseries is still being cited as the high-water mark for King's small-screen output.

HBO ordered The Outsider to series in 2018, before Stephen King's novel had even hit bookstores. That's how confident the network was in the material. The show premiered in early 2020, and six years on, it's still getting cited as the best King miniseries out there, according to a recent Collider retrospective on the series.

The setup is classic King crime-horror. A young boy is found mutilated in the woods, and every piece of evidence, every witness, points to local baseball coach Terry Maitland, played by Jason Bateman. Detective Ralph Anderson, played by Ben Mendelsohn, arrests him publicly, mid-game, in front of a crowd. Then the alibi turns out to be airtight. That's when Holly Gibney, the recurring King character played by Cynthia Erivo, gets pulled in to chase down a theory nobody on the case wants to say out loud: that something not human did this.

The Mendelsohn-Erivo pairing is where the show earns its reputation. Ralph is grieving, proud, allergic to anything that can't be explained. Holly walks straight at the impossible and treats it like Tuesday. Collider's piece points to that contrast, rational cop versus a woman who's simply willing to look at what's in front of her, as the engine of the whole series. Mendelsohn folds in the character's own history, including the death of his son, so his resistance to the supernatural reads as grief wearing the costume of logic.

Around them, Mare Winningham and Julianne Nicholson play the wives caught in the fallout. Winningham's Jeannie keeps pushing back against her husband's skepticism. Nicholson's Glory is stuck defending a husband the whole town has already convicted, while her own daughter starts seeing a figure that shouldn't be there. Marc Menchaca's Detective Jack Hoskins gets his own reckoning with the show's central myth, El Cuco, the Spanish and Portuguese boogeyman that gives the story its shape without ever quite explaining itself.

The show isn't without its critics. The finale breaks from King's novel on where the creature comes from and how it's finally dealt with, and Collider's piece concedes there's real merit to that complaint. Adapting King has never been simple, his stories lean hard on the otherworldly, and The Outsider's own villain is arguably its weakest link. What the series gets right is everything around that villain: the dread, the grief, the slow erosion of certainty in people who thought they knew how the world worked.

King adaptations haven't slowed down since. It, The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck have all landed well, and Mike Flanagan's upcoming take on Carrie is already drawing attention before a frame has aired. Whether Flanagan or anyone else matches what The Outsider did with its central duo remains the open question. For now, six years in, it's still the one other King shows get measured against.