This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Stephen King adaptation, Brian De Palma’s seminal 1976 Carrie. That means that for five full decades now, audiences have been inundated not only by King’s written stories — the author is obscenely prolific, both as himself and under various pseudonyms — but also translations of his work to the screen.
Due to the success of things like the original Carrie, many of the adaptations of King’s work have aimed for the big screen over the years, as theatrically released movies. However, the writer’s tenure on television has arguably been just as successful, if not more so.
Stephen King's books are generally more suited for TV shows than movies
The first ever television adaptation of King’s work was the 1979 miniseries event Salem’s Lot, directed by Tobe Hooper. And to see the differences between a television and movie adaptation of a King book, one needs to look no further than this. Hooper’s TV miniseries does an admirable job of attempting to convey the sweeping, large-scale spread of vampirism through the sleepy town of Salem’s Lot, much like King’s sophomore novel.
In 2024, the book was adapted again, this time as a movie, with a vastly shorter runtime, and the results speak for themselves. While the movie was fun enough in its own right, its attempts to condense King’s sprawling novel into a more traditional structure fall flat and demonstrate precisely why the more luxurious runtimes of TV can be a much more apt fit for King’s writing.
Fascinatingly, the two biggest hits of the most recent batch of King TV adaptations are ones that don’t really take advantage of this inherent plus. It: Welcome to Derry is based on scraps of King’s It novel, most of which had already been adapted into two feature films by the same creative team who are now expounding upon those efforts through the TV show.
Similarly, the new Carrie TV show takes one of King’s shortest novels ever and attempts to add material to it to expand it to a full eight-episode run in some occasionally strange ways. The success of these shows demonstrates that the appetite for King TV is very much still there, which means that it’s a perfect time for someone to do a season of television on one of King’s most twisted and ambitious novels: Revival.
King's Revival would make an incredible TV series
For the uninitiated, Revival was a relatively recent novel within King’s larger canon, released in 2014. Despite the fact that the book is a good deal younger than many of the titles people often think of when considering the staples of King’s work, Revival has built up a pretty foreboding legacy over the course of the past decade-plus. Many (this writer very much included) consider it to be among King’s most harrowing and disturbing works, as he channels a far more cosmic level of horror in palpably affecting ways.
The book clocks in around the 400-page mark, meaning it is double the size of Carrie. But even more important to this conversation is how Revival utilizes that runtime. It is predominantly a tale of the relationship between Jamie Morton (a young man) and Charlie Jacobs (a minister) over the course of several decades and is structured in extremely unconventional, lyrical ways.
While there have been a couple of attempts over the years to get a production of Revival going as a movie (Mike Flanagan famously got close to making it happen), such efforts would likely be doomed to a similar fate as the recent movie version of Salem’s Lot: cramming a square-shaped peg into a round-shaped hole. Rather, by doing Revival as a season of prestige TV, the novel could be given room to breathe, and its true epicenter (the central relationship between Jamie and Jacobs) could have room to ebb and flow in a much more impactful way.
Given just how popular retreads of well-worn King stories have been in recent years (Welcome to Derry is the third iteration of takes on the It novel, the new Carrie show is the seventh(!?!) take on the book), it would be wonderful to see some of King’s less ubiquitous and un-adapted works get some love as well.
Revival stands as one of King’s greatest and most singularly terrifying accomplishments on the page, and to see it get a TV adaptation that allows its ever-evolving story and characters the room they need to really come to life would be a nightmare come true.
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