Don’t Be Afraid to Get Weird
King’s Dark Tower books are unapologetically weird. Robot bears, raccoon-dog hybrids, talking lobster monsters, alternate reality versions of Jesus, singing roses – there’s a ton of far-out shit happening in the books, and King presents most of it in matter-of-fact ways. The Dark Tower TV show shouldn’t be afraid to lean into all the weirdness. Don’t fret about audiences not “getting it” – just embrace the strange otherworldly elements of King’s novel, and trust that audiences will go along with it all. The show will be more rewarding as a result.
Stay True To The Books
This ties into the above suggestion: don’t be afraid of the source material. The Dark Tower movie streamlined a ton of King’s rich, complex mythology and storytelling. I get why they did that – you only have so much time in a film to tell a story. But with a TV series, you have a lot more room to breathe. You can stretch King’s storylines over entire episodes. You could even break each individual book into seasons – season 1 focuses on the first book in the series, season 2 on the second, and so on. Will it be slightly confusing to the uninitiated at first? Maybe! But that’s okay! HBO’s Game of Thrones has proven that you can adapt elaborate mythologies and still draw in a general audience. There’s no reason the Dark Tower series can’t do the same.
By Chris Evangelista/June 12, 2018 10:00 am EST
Jettison All Copies of the Movie Into Space
“It’s being written. I was part of writing the pilot, like the first season ideas and the pilot and the second episode. It’s gonna be awesome. What was exciting about that, whereas with the film, we were really trying to create an introduction and make a standalone film that could sort of live in itself, but what was also exciting, working on the TV show at the same time, is that is totally canon.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Get Weird
King’s Dark Tower books are unapologetically weird. Robot bears, raccoon-dog hybrids, talking lobster monsters, alternate reality versions of Jesus, singing roses – there’s a ton of far-out shit happening in the books, and King presents most of it in matter-of-fact ways. The Dark Tower TV show shouldn’t be afraid to lean into all the weirdness. Don’t fret about audiences not “getting it” – just embrace the strange otherworldly elements of King’s novel, and trust that audiences will go along with it all. The show will be more rewarding as a result.
Stay True To The Books
This ties into the above suggestion: don’t be afraid of the source material. The Dark Tower movie streamlined a ton of King’s rich, complex mythology and storytelling. I get why they did that – you only have so much time in a film to tell a story. But with a TV series, you have a lot more room to breathe. You can stretch King’s storylines over entire episodes. You could even break each individual book into seasons – season 1 focuses on the first book in the series, season 2 on the second, and so on. Will it be slightly confusing to the uninitiated at first? Maybe! But that’s okay! HBO’s Game of Thrones has proven that you can adapt elaborate mythologies and still draw in a general audience. There’s no reason the Dark Tower series can’t do the same.
Appeal to Adults
Again, I understand why the movie adaptation went this route: they wanted to draw in as much of an audience as possible, and the theory holds that a PG-13 movie is more likely to appeal to a general audience than a R-rated flick. But now that the adaptation is heading to TV, it’s okay to embrace the R-rated nature of King’s material. Again, look at Game of Thrones – HBO’s adaptation didn’t hesitate to appeal to an adult audience, and reaped the rewards as a result.
The real problem, as far as I’m concerned is, they went in to this movie and I think this was a studio edict, pretty much, this is going to be a PG-13 movie. It’s going to be a tentpole movie. We want to make sure that we get people in there from the ages of, let’s say, 12 right on up to whatever the target age is. Let’s say 12 to 35. That’s what we want. So it has to be PG-13 and when they did that, I think that they lost a lot of the toughness of it and it became something where people went to it and said, Well yeah, but it’s really not anything that we haven’t seen before.
