Executive produced by Richard Price

Seven episodes written by Richard Price: S1E1 “Fish in a Barrel,” S1E2 “Roanoke,” S1E3 “Dark Uncle,” S1E4 “Que Viene El Coco,” S1E5 “Tear-Drinker,” S1E8 “Foxhead,” S1E10 “Must/Can’t”

I’ve waited a while to review this series because it seemed to have been quite successful and I kept expecting it to be renewed for additional seasons on one platform or another, even after HBO announced in the fall of 2020 that they wouldn’t be moving forward with it. So far, however, no new episodes have been forthcoming, and since the show represents Richard Price’s first foray into the horror genre (sort of), I decided to rewatch it and prepare a Priced Out writeup for this year’s Halloween season. That turned out to be good timing, as it seems Price will have a new novel, Lazarus Man, in stores November 12th! I’ll be eager to dive into that once it’s available (though as always I’ll want to sit with it a while before writing a review), but for now let’s revisit this eerie example of Price’s TV work.

The Outsider, which aired on HBO from January 12th to March 8th of 2020, was an adaptation of the 2018 Stephen King novel of the same name. It begins with Georgia baseball coach and apparent mensch Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman, who also directed the first two episodes) being arrested for a brutal child murder. When seemingly irrefutable evidence emerges supporting both Maitland’s guilt and an ironclad alibi, local detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) finds himself navigating an increasingly otherworldly mystery along with a ragtag band of investigators that includes offbeat savant Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo).

Ben Mendelsohn and Cynthia Erivo in The Outsider

Although much of Price’s work has dealt in dark subject matter, this is, again, more or less the first time he’s actually worked in the horror genre. (He did some uncredited script doctor work on the horror-tinged 2012 mystery film The Raven, and as far as I know may have worked on other horror projects that ultimately weren’t produced or on which he wasn’t credited.) Price often mentioned this in interviews around the time of The Outsider‘s broadcast; for example, in a June 2020 Variety Streaming Room conversation he said “I’ve been a horror geek, a secret horror geek, since I was a teenager” and recounted bonding with Stephen King over this shared interest: “I’d show him–take photos, hold up my 1960s horror collections, Tales to Be Told in the Dark, Zacherley’s Vulture Stew, you know, and he’d–’Oh, you kept it?!’ …So it was just, like, two horror geeks. Very fraternal.”

I’m a big horror fan myself and hadn’t previously been aware of Price’s affection for the genre, but these remarks did make me think of his 1998 novel Freedomland. As I said in my review of that book, it’s ultimately a down-to-earth crime story but makes use of typical horror tropes and imagery such as nightmares, urban legends and descriptive invocations of “a moonstruck sea of coffins” (in reference to rows of uninstalled refrigerators) in order to heighten the sense of dread suffusing its bleak narrative. This may have been Price’s inner “secret horror geek” coming out.

As you might expect, though, The Outsider was hardly the second coming of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt. It’s more reminiscent of recent premium cable crime shows like True Detective (which had its own hints of cosmic horror) or Price’s own The Night Of, with an element of overt supernaturalism added into the mix. In the moments when it reaches for out-and-out terror, such as some of the villain’s appearances before minion Jack Hoskins (Marc Menchaca), it can be very effectively scary. But those moments are relatively few and far between, with more focus being put on the relationships between the characters and their own efforts to cope with a confounding situation.

Price also spoke in interviews about the challenges of adapting a novel, telling Variety, “A book is four-dimensional because the book can give you the inner thoughts of a character… I had to translate a lot of stuff that a novelist would have the freedom to say in exposition.” I was surprised to realize that despite his extensive screenwriting career, it actually has been rare for him to adapt other writers’ novels. He’s written movie remakes like Kiss of Death and Ransom (and even a TV remake, The Night Of, which was adapted from the BBC show Criminal Justice) and translated his own books to the screen with Clockers and Freedomland, but his only other produced adaptation of someone else’s novel was 2015’s Child 44. He apparently prefers working with others’ material, though, saying to Variety, “When I’m adapting my own stuff, it’s like I’m a doctor and my appendix burst and I guess I’ll just take it out myself, but really you should get another doctor.” He enjoyed working with King as well, describing himself as a fan of King’s work and saying that the author was supportive throughout the creation of the show. The admiration seems to have been mutual; King said in a behind-the-scenes featurette that “You couldn’t ask for a better adapter.”

I read the novel prior to watching the series and found the show to be an impressive adaptation in that it’s very faithful to the book’s overall story while allowing itself the flexibility to do its own thing with the details of the execution. There are a few major changes to the plot: In the show, Anderson’s son is deceased, giving him more of a connection to the villain’s victims, and Gibney’s race has been changed from white to Black, apparently simply because Bateman and HBO wanted to cast Erivo (who will soon be headlining the upcoming film adaptation of Wicked). Price also had to invent new characters and events for the show’s later installments, telling The New York Post that he burned through the book’s first half in the first three episodes. But overall, his touch is evident less in the plotting than in the details, the compassionate sketching of the characters and the convincingly oblique ways of showing what they’re feeling–take, for example, a witness’s traumatized horror being conveyed by their uncomprehending reaction to a detective’s question about whether they checked to see if a hideously mangled child was still alive.

I enjoyed The Outsider, although I admit that as a Richard Price fan I was a little disappointed that it didn’t feel like it was in his wheelhouse as much as something like The Night Of. That’s mainly because it doesn’t take place in New York City (except for a brief detour to investigate related murders there) or a similar urban center. Price himself seemed to chafe at this dislocation; he told Salon “I don’t have that same ability to settle in to the nuance and capture the mentality of a small city of 50,000 people” and said that a second season would have to be set in NYC.

As the first season wrapped up, such a followup seemed to be underway. The conclusion left the narrative door ever so slightly open for a sequel (“And that’s it for the creature–or is it?” Price said in a behind-the-scenes featurette), and in that June 2020 Variety discussion Price said he was already at work on a second season for HBO. But several months later HBO officially dropped the series, and no other platform ever stepped up to renew it. I don’t really know why this happened. Not only did The Outsider receive generally positive reviews, it also got good ratings, pulling in more viewers than contemporaries Watchmen and True Detective Season 3 and, even better, actually growing its audience over the course of its run. Stephen King seemed to be similarly mystified by the show’s cancellation: Three years later, in April of this year, he quote-tweeted a post reading “Rewatching HBO’s The Outsider, based on the @StephenKing novel. This show SO deserved a second season” and added “Yes. It did.”

Nonetheless, at this point Cynthia Erivo’s version of Holly Gibney seems unlikely to ever return–but Richard Price will, with the new novel Lazarus Man, out November 12th! As I’ve said, I’m extremely excited for that, and I encourage you to check it out as well.

A few other notes:

• The Outsider wrapped up just about a week before COVID-19 lockdowns began in the United States. In an eerie coincidence, Episode 9 features a brief discussion of the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic.

• You never quite see his face, but Price himself makes one of his trademark cameos in The Outsider‘s final episode:

• Price’s daughter Genevieve Hudson-Price appeared as a helpful bartender in a couple episodes as well.

• According to a September Publishers Weekly profile, Richard Price recently became a grandfather. Congratulations to him and his family!