When Stephen King did streaming before streaming: “We were ahead of our time”
Hollywood was obsessed with adapting Stephen King long before streaming was a twinkle in the internet age’s eye, and with more options available to audiences than ever before, it was inevitable that the prolific author would become one of the on-demand circuit’s most cannibalised creators.
King’s back catalogue has continued to be one of the industry’s favourite avenues, with fresh takes and reboots of countless novels, short stories, and novellas being given the feature-length or episodic treatment across multiple streamers, but the titan of terror has suggested he’s always been ahead of the curve.
Technically, he’s got a point, even if it’s easy to pick holes in the belief that King was doing streaming before streaming existed, since nobody had a clue that film and television would eventually evolve into a place where millions of viewers paid their monthly subscription fees to watch whatever they wanted at the push of a button.
However, it’s easy to see what he’s getting at, and there’s plenty of evidence to back up his point. “Mick Garris and I were doing streaming back in the 1990s, only the shows were on network TV,” he wrote on social media. “They were then called ‘miniseries’. We were ahead of our time.” Yes, you can say, ‘That’s not streaming, Stephen King, that’s television’, and be correct, but dig a little deeper, and he’s not wrong.
King and Garris collaborated on bringing The Stand and The Shining to the small screen in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and that doesn’t include Tom Holland’s The Langoliers, Tommy Lee Wallace’s It, John Power’s The Tommyknockers, or Craig R Baxley’s Storm of the Century, all of which were multi-episode events based on the scribe’s work that aired on the small screen during the decade.
Did King invent, or popularise, the miniseries? Of course not, and several of his stories had been adapted long before the ’90s. On the other hand, one author or creative driving force being responsible for a multitude of projects that can be beamed directly into an audience’s living room or device of choice has become more prevalent than ever in the streaming era, and he was definitely ahead of his time in that regard.
There’s Mike Flanagan, who oversaw multiple Netflix miniseries and has told a handful of King stories. Michael Connelly’s bibliography has given rise to Prime Video’s Bosch and its various spinoffs, along with Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer. Streamers are falling over themselves to snap up the rights to Harlan Coben’s books, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Is it revolutionary? No. Is King being tongue-in-cheek? Maybe. Does that mean he’s incorrect? Technically not.
The way the industry works, especially with streaming, is that if an author’s work becomes the basis of a hit TV show or miniseries, more will follow in its wake. King was on the receiving end of the trend three decades ago, and he’s still a massive part of it now, so in a way, he and Garris really were ahead of their time.
