This is not a Stephen King story. It has his blessing. It has his characters. It cites his publishing history, and it is set in one of his oft-visited fictional towns.
But Castle Rock, the 10-episode series now available on Hulu, is not a Stephen King story. It isn’t even really a pastiche of his stories, like Netflix’s immensely successful Stranger Things. Instead, Castle Rock is a moody, intermittently creepy, and ultimately hollow pastiche of recent genre TV.
As was the case with Lost, Castle Rock’s frequent mysteries are extended almost entirely by dint of its characters being remarkably bad at basic communication. As is the case with American Horror Story, inexplicable weirdness is dumped into each episode like a kid overzealously slapping the bottom of a ketchup bottle, blatting a giant red puddle onto now-drowned fries. And like Fargo, it tries to adapt the “feel” of auteurism by proxy—sprinkling sly references to the canon being riffed on as both an elbow-nudging reassurance and a storytelling shortcut.