What the heck are "The Langoliers"?
You're not going to find them in the dictionary, but you will find a miniseries about them on ABC on Sunday and Monday, May 14 and 15 (8 p.m., Ch. 4).Would it help if you knew that the full title of the two-parter is "Stephen King's The Langoliers"?
Yes, indeed, this is another strange tale of relatively normal people operating in extraordinary circumstances - and threatened by the Langoliers.
"I think that everybody knows the Langoliers in one form or another," said Richard P. Rubinstein, the executive producer of the miniseries. "You know, when you're younger and your parents want to instill a certain discipline into you and they tell you that if you don't behave a certain way the bogyman is going to get you.
"Well, this is Steve's word for a certain kind of horror, a thing that goes bump in the night. It's his image."
It's also based on his novella, which was published as part of "Four Past Midnight," a collection of four of King's shorter works. (Although "shorter" is a relative term for King - "The Langoliers" runs about 240 pages.)
As to what exactly the Langoliers are, you'll have to wait until nearly the end of the four-hour miniseries to see. Let's just say they've got lots of teeth, they're computer-generated special effects, and they're not disappointing.
(Unlike that dopey spider at the end of another King-inspired miniseries, "It," about which even the author himself expressed dissatisfaction.)
"The Langoliers" starts off slowly. A group of relatively normal passengers embark on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston.
There's an airline pilot (David Morse). A mystery writer (Dean Stockwell). A 12-year-old blind girl (Kate Maberly). A rather mysterious man (Mark Lindsay Chapman). A lonely schoolteacher (Patricia Wettig). A troubled teenage girl (Kimber Riddle). A talented teenage boy (Christopher Collet). A hungry business traveler (Baxter Harris). A grandfather (Frankie Faison).
About the only unusual thing is the overbearing, obnoxious and mentally unstable businessman (Bronson Pinchot).
But, of course, this is Stephen King - so the flight is anything but normal.
"This is, in some ways, Steve's take on an Irwin Allen movie," Rubinstein said. "There's a little bit of a sort of an airplane disaster to this, with Steve King's slightly offbeat perspective."
"Slightly?!?" interjected Pinchot.
Indeed. Those 10 passengers awake in midflight to discover they're the only ones left on board the plane.
That's right. The rest of the passengers, the pilots and the flight attendants have all disappeared - leaving behind odd bits like watches, false teeth and pacemakers.
Worse than that, everyone else in the world seems to have disappeared as well. There's no light from the cities below and nothing but static on the communications system.
Fortunately, there's a pilot aboard. But when he lands the plane in Bangor, Maine, there's nobody there - and there's a strange, ominous noise off in the distance.
The crux of "The Langoliers" is how those 10 people on that plane deal with this bizarre situation.
"I suppose it's about grace under pressure," said director Tom Holland. "This is really about relationships between the characters who are trapped in this world, and what it does to them as people."
As the other nine quickly learn, having a maniacal jerk along (the businessman played by Pinchot) is not a good idea.
It's quite a change of pace for Pinchot, best known for comedic roles like the one in his long-running sitcom "Perfect Strangers." And while he's not quite up to the task, Pinchot said he greatly enjoyed himself.
"I had always found that when I was doing a lot of light comedy, I was pretty much of a stressed-out individual when I went home," Pinchot said. "But doing this - and there's lots of violence in it - I stab several people and terrorize several more. And I was really in a rather jolly mood."
(Part 1 of "The Langoliers" is pretty much without violence, but Part 2 contains some graphic killings. This is definitely not a production for the entire family.)
The cast, on the whole, creates believable characters in an unbelievable situation. (Pinchot is the exception - too much of his comic persona leaks through and undermines the maniac he's trying to create.)
And there's the nearly obligatory cameo appearance by Stephen King himself toward the end of "The Langoliers."
Holland, who also wrote the screenplay, does a fine job of adapting King's novella. The action builds slowly throughout the first two hours, but it sucks the viewers in by creating an intriguing concept and asking baffling questions.
Those questions are eventually answered. And, if you don't spend too much time over-analyzing, everything makes sense within the framework of unbelievability.
"We're asking everybody to sort of suspend their disbelief and get on the roller coaster," Rubinstein said. "Steve's built the tracks."