‘Here they store what came before. Pain and suffering from days of yore…’
My ongoing commitment to devouring everything Stephen King related has been quite the odyssey and the latest stop on this macabre tour is Kingdom Hospital – the 13-episode TV show that King developed and co-wrote for ABC back in 2004. Based on Lars von Trier’s own TV show The Kingdom, King’s iteration came in the wake of his near-fatal car accident and this is very much reflected in the show itself (we open with a car crash – the effects of which echo throughout the rest of the season). Like many of King’s contributions to the world of film and television, Kingdom Hospital is wildly uneven…
In a naked attempt to capitalise on the ushering in of the peak era of TV following the success of The Sopranos, Kingdom Hospital asks the question, ‘What would happen if Twin Peaks was set in a hospital and written by Stephen King?’. The answer is a TV show that has moments of brilliance but is too often tonally inconsistent and incoherent. Nobody mourned its passing when it was unceremoniously dumped after its first season.
Despite a strong cast featuring Andrew McCarthy, Bruce Davison and Diane Ladd, Kingdom Hospital starts off slowly and then never really hits its stride in the episodes that follow. King has never been great at writing comedy, and that just makes the uneasy blend of pathos, darkness and black humour all the more difficult to swallow. The show meanders along rather without purpose until the excellent final episode, and that last chapter hints that there could have been a redemption for Kingdom Hospital had it been allowed to continue. Frustrating.
Twenty years on and unavailable to stream anywhere online, Kingdom Hospital stands as an odd footnote in King’s career that is endemic of a time in which the iconic writer had struggled to regain his mojo following a horrific accident. One for King completists only.