TVSquad

(S01E08) While I haven't been overwhelmed by every episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, for the most part I think they picked decent stories to base the episodes on. I would have liked to seen more of Stephen King's older short stories represented, but I guess the producers lost my phone number or they forgot to call and ask me which stories I would have picked.

Anyway, I would not have picked "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" as one of the stories. One of my favorite things about Stephen King's short stories is how outlandish they can be, but this one, about a couple that winds up in a small town inhabited by dead rock stars, was just silly. I thought maybe they could turn that into something kind of fun and goofy for television, but instead they played it straight, which really wasn't the best approach.

(S01E06) I've never been a big fan of gritty crime drama, which is why "The Fifth Quarter" has never been my favorite short story of Stephen King's. It's a very bare bones tale of a man whose friend is killed over a buried stash of millions of dollars and his subsequent quest to retrieve four pieces of a map, each belonging to a different "bad guy." It's not really typically "King" and even he acknowledgers in the Notes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes that the story is more like something that would have come from Richard Bachman (his occasional nom de plume) or even Richard Stark, the malevolent writer from his novel The Dark Half.

Of course, I can't really blame King for wanting to try something a little different once in awhile, but in a lot of ways the story works much better in a visual medium. The problem is, one hour isn't enough for a story that is this involved. Screenwriter Alan Sharp fleshes the story out by giving the protagonist (Jeremy Sisto) a wife and kid, and everyone in this episode plays their parts well, trying to convey a lot of backstory in a short time so we can get to the blood and guns. If anything, the episode suffers from trying to cram way too much drama into a short amount of time. I think this would have worked much better as a feature film, following Wilie (Sisto) as he hunts down the men who killed his friend and begins to piece together the map that will lead he and his family to a better life. That could still happen, I suppose, it's not like they haven't done multiple adaptations of King's work before.

(S01E05) "The Road Virus Heads North," from Stephen King's collection Everything's Eventual, is a pretty straightforward horror tale, especially for King. That doesn't mean it's a bad story, but it seems like the kind of spooky campfire tale that would come easily to him, and this TV adaptation moves along rather quickly, just like the story itself. The living painting that chronicles the journey of the madman within it is based on an actual painting owned by King.

Tom Berenger plays a horror novelist named Richard Kinnell who lives in Derry, Maine (the same fictional town where King's novels IT and Insomnia take place). King uses part of his story to poke fun at people who ask him the same two questions over and over: Where do you get your ideas? And do you ever scare yourself? Kinnell encounters those questions when he attends a book signing where rabid fans cheer and crowd around him as if he's a rock star rather than just a writer. He has other things on his mind however, because he just received his first colonoscopy and it's possible he has cancer. On his drive back home he stops off at a yard sale and purchases a painting of a crazy-looking driver with scraggly hair driving a car across a bridge. The painting is titled "The Road Virus Heads North" (natch) and the woman who sells it to him explains that the kid who painted it was a depressed coke-addled genius who painted several other paintings much more horrific than this one, but burned them all on the front lawn before hanging himself with a chain in the garage.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean (USA)
2. Home Run Derby (ESPN)
3. The Closer (TNT)
4. Nextel Cup (TNT)
5. WWE RAW - Mon, 10pm (USA)
6. Nightmares & Dreamscapes - Weds, 9pm (TNT)
7. Monk (USA)
8. Psych (USA)
9. WWE RAW - Mon, 9pm (USA)
10. Nightmares & Dreamscapes - Weds, 9:54pm (no idea what that means - TNT)

(S01E04) "The End of the Whole Mess" is one of my favorite Stephen King short stories for two reasons. One, it's written by a protagonist who is slowly losing his mind as the story progresses, much like an earlier short story of his titled "Survivor Type" (from the Skeleton Crew collection). The other reason I like it so much is that it's very unstereotypically King. It's a very touching and very human story about misplaced good intentions, those same intentions that pave the road to Hell, as the cliche goes.

In the story, the teller is Howie Fornoy, a freelance writer. In the TV version he's a documentary filmmaker and he tapes his final moments on Earth rather than writing about them, which makes sense, this being a television episode after all. Howard is played by Ron Livingston, and his younger brother, Bobby, is played by Henry Thomas. The two brothers are intelligent kids with intelligent parents, but Bobby is especially so. Howie describes him as a kind of wandering genius, someone like Da Vinci or Einstein flittering from one interest to the next like a compass trying to find True North. Bobby finally finds his True North when he and a team of researchers discover a town in Texas called La Planta where the water contains proteins not found anywhere else, including one only found in the human brain. It turns out the water acts as a kind of "calmative" that renders the entire town and its people completely passive and nonviolent.

(S01E02) Nightmares are an interesting phenomenon. What can seem terrifying while it's playing out in your subconscious loses much of its power once you wake up and try to explain it to someone. In that regard, Nightmares and Dreamscapes was a perfectly apt title for Stephen King's 1993 short story collection. When King is at his best, he's able to make even the most absurd situations seem real and horrific. When those same ideas are fleshed out into a visual medium, however, they become diluted without King etching the images into your mind himself.

This is why so many of King's works suffer when they're translated to the movie or television screen, and why "Crouch End" the second offering of the new series Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (click here for Keith's review of the premiere episode "Battleground," based on a short story from the Night Shift collection) was more tiresome than terrifying. Also, out of all the short stories the man has written, this wasn't his best one.

It hasn't even aired on television yet (it starts on Wednesday on TNT), but Warner will release the DVD set for the Stephen King miniseries Nightmares & Dreamscapes on October 24.

In addition to episodes starring Steven Weber, William Hurt, Kim Delaney, and Tom Berenger, the set will include an extended episode starring William H. Macy that won't air on the TV version of the miniseries. The set will also have commentaries and documentaries.

Take a look at Keith's preview of the show here.

TNT will be premiering two new series and the season opener of another this summer without commercial interruptions. The two new shows, Saved and Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, will eschew commercials for product placement and on-air promotions. Saved is being sponsored by Dodge and Quiznos, but no sponsor has been announced for Nightmares and Dreamscapes. In addition, the second season opening of The Closer, which will make up a drama block along with Saved, will also premiere sans commercials, but sponsored by Audi. AOL (which owns TV Squad) will also be integrated into the storylines of both Saved and The Closer.

The idea of a commercial-free episode is nice and all, but I'm somewhat wary of this if the "product placement" or "brand integration" or whatever you want to call it gets too out of hand and distracts from the story. I guess we'll have to wait and see if they can make it as seamless as it needs to be. If not, I'm willing to accept a few commercial breaks.

Chris also picked this story up earlier over on Ad Jab.