The book Stephen King hated that became an even worse TV series: “I didn’t care for it at all”
In his career, Stephen King has written 65 novels and over 200 short stories. 29 of these have been adapted for television, either in miniseries, TV movie, or ongoing series form. Most authors—even the most successful ones—could scarcely dream of these numbers, and they speak to King’s sheer cultural omnipresence over the last five decades.
Interestingly, though, one of the best things about King’s stratospheric success is the fact that he doesn’t need to sugarcoat how he feels about his books or their adaptations. In fact, there is one story that he particularly hates – in book and TV form.
King burst onto the horror scene in 1974 with Carrie, which was an enormous success. Over the next four years, he wrote four more novels – Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Rage, and The Stand – and watched Carrie be adapted into a hit Brian De Palma movie. In a very short space of time, King went from working as a high school English teacher to becoming an extremely in-demand author and a genuine celebrity.
As King admitted to Rolling Stone in 2014, he had always had a problem with drinking. However, as his career accelerated, this addiction took a terrible hold over his life – and then spiralled into a completely separate addiction. “I didn’t drink in the days,” King insisted. “Sometimes if I had, like, two things going – which I did a lot, sometimes I still do – I would work at night. And if I was working at night, I was looped.” However, he admitted that cocaine entered the picture “around the same time that I realized that I was out of control with drinking.” He wound up being “a heavy user from 1978 until 1986.”
During this period, King had a wife and three young children at home, and genuinely doesn’t know how he managed to keep his addictions a secret. “I don’t remember,” he confessed. “That whole time is pretty hazy to me.” However, looking back on that unfortunate period as an older man, King realised that his home and work lives both started to suffer after a while. “Little by little, the family life started to show cracks,” he explained, and added, “The books start to show it after a while.”
For King, the worst offender of this time in his life is The Tommyknockers, which was published in 1987. It was the last novel he wrote before he got clean of drugs and alcohol, and he is adamant it was “an awful book.”
At 558 pages, King believes this sci-fi tale about a mysterious object in the woods that causes the people of a small Maine town to act strangely is one of his more bloated efforts. In fact, his memory of The Tommyknockers is that it’s even longer than it is – he grumbled, “The book is about 700 pages long, and I’m thinking, ‘There’s probably a good 350-page novel in there.'” King puts the excess padding of the book down to the “spurious energy that cocaine provides,” and he’s often felt the urge to go back and edit it down.
When it came time for The Tommyknockers to become a 1993 TV miniseries starring Jimmy Smits (NYPD Blue) and Marg Helgenberger (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), screenwriter Lawrence D Cohen made several changes to the story that King approved of. However, that didn’t help his overall opinion of the show, which he hated just about as much as his book.
“I didn’t like it; I didn’t care for it at all,” King groused to The New York Times in 2020. “It felt kind of cheap and thrown together. I felt like they missed the sense of the book.” Ironically, at only three hours long, King felt the TV adaptation of his famously overlong book could have stood to have more room to breathe. In fact, he insisted it “should have been much longer.”
Best of all, though, was that while King believed Smits was “a fine actor,” he wasn’t a fan of the “pretentious, portentous lines” he was forced to spout for much of the runtime. Given King’s complete disdain for the book, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out these were his lines and not Cohen’s.
