Nightmares N Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
9 and 10 tonight
TNT
If you read our valentine to the Fourth of July Twilight Zone marathon, you already know how much weez luhhhhhves the creepy anthology format. Alfred Hitchcock Presents was always right behind Rod Serling's little bundle of darkness, and while shows like Outer Limits and the one on cable hosted by a puppet corpse are pale, bloodless imitators, even now they beat the stuffing out of 95 percent of the reality shows clogging your TiVo. Well, sports fans, here comes master storyteller Stephen King—or at least his paid-handsomely for imprimatur—and like another prolific Stephen (Spielberg), we're going to give his creepy anthology series a chance. Eight episodes are airing over four weeks, and up first tonight is “Battleground” with William Hurt playing a professional hit man (if I had a nickel for every time I mistakenly hired an amateur!) who offs the CEO of a toy company—and then has revenge delivered to him in the form of a package from the toy company. At 10, “Crouch End” has American newlyweds (Eion Bailey and Claire Forlani) honeymooning in London before going to Crouch End to meet a friend for dinner, but discovering the town is not what it appears to be. Christ if both of those don't already sound TZish. But when it comes to compelling first acts, nobody beats the King. My problem with his novels and short stories and films adapted from his works is the supernatural hoo-haw piled onto his endings, so here's hoping the hour format keeps such supernaturalness to a minimum—unless it involves alien abductions and especially painful probes of contestants on Rock Star: Supernova, Last Comic Standing, America's Got Talent, So You Think You Can Dance, Master of Champions, etc., etc., etc. . . . infinity.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.