The Outsider

This started out kinda cool but I will warn you, it gets boring and stays that way for most of the season. This is a story that could have been handled in two hours. For some reason, they stretched this out with scenes of extremely long car rides and very meaningless dialog. A few of the characters are interesting but it isn't enough. So with all the show choices these days, I would pass on this and find something better. It isn't even scary. Sure, it's mysterious for a while but once the mystery is solved (and it's solved rather early on) I found it pointless and dumb.

Starts very strong but the narrative weakens as the show progresses

Tuvo a todo el mundo en poco; fue el espantajo y el coco del mundo, en tal coyuntura, que acreditó su ventura morir cuerdo y vivir loco.

• Miguel de Cervantes; El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de La Mancha (1615)

Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out.

• Stephen King; The Outsider (2018)

If you ever wondered what the first season of True Detective might have looked like had the merely-hinted-at supernatural elements become more than merely hinted at, then The Outsider gives you a possible answer. Starting as a grim and gritty police procedural, the show takes a left turn in the third episode, before diving head-first into the supernatural in the sixth and seventh. And do these two tones mix well? Kind of. The early episodes are easily the strongest, and as the hokey horror elements start to take over, the foreboding portentousness of those beautifully constructed episodes gives way to Stephen King-isms. Relatable themes such as guilt and the paralysis of grief are dropped in favour of larger (and thus more abstract) issues such as the infectious nature of evil and the ability of ordinary people to band together in extraordinary circumstances (as I said, it's King-101). But for all that, and despite the not entirely successful mixing of genres, I enjoyed the show. I hadn't read the novel, and so I was genuinely invested in finding out where all of everything led. And even though the journey (the early stages, in particular), proved more interesting than the destination, it was a journey that I don't regret taking.

Cherokee City, Georgia. When the badly mutilated corpse of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in the woods, homicide detective Ralph Anderson (the always excellent Ben Mendelsohn) immediately launches an investigation...