Stephen King is absolutely passionate about "Kingdom Hospital." Unfortunately, he may be the only one.
That the 15-hour, limited-run series is odd is no surprise. This is, after all, Stephen King. (The show premieres with a two-hour episode Wednesday at 8 p.m. on ABC/Ch. 4.)
Well, it's sort of half-King. It's his adaptation of a Danish miniseries written and directed by Lars von Trier.
The single biggest difference is that King turned his version into an autobiography of sorts. Jack Coleman stars as Peter Rickman, a famous and hugely successful artist who is struck and nearly killed by a van on a road near his home in Maine. Which, not coincidentally, is what happened to a certain famous and hugely successfully author who was struck and nearly killed by a van on a road near his home in Maine.
King became interested in the project in 1996, during the filming of the miniseries remake of "The Shining." According to executive producer Mark Carliner, they were in Colorado when King came across a video of the Danish TV show in a bin at a local store. King told Carliner it was "the most terrifying thing he'd seen and it was hysterically funny" and wanted to adapt it for American TV.
Although von Trier was interested and "a tremendous admirer of Stephen's," the American rights had already been sold and Sony was attempting to make it into a theatrical film.
Soon, fictional horror and real-life horror converged. In 1999, King was struck by that van "and really hovered between life and death for a long period of time, and spent a good bit of that year in and out of hospitals. 'Kingdom Hospital' came alive in his mind at that point.
"He was so moved and driven by what he had experienced in the hospital" that King wrote a 15-hour script, despite the fact that he didn't have the rights to the project. ABC was immediately interested, and rights-holder Sony — which hadn't been able to turn it into a movie — also quickly came on board.
Their enthusiasm may have been misplaced, however. At least in its first two hours, "Kingdom Hospital" is somewhat intriguing but not at all engaging. It's not the sort of thing that's going to hook you and keep you coming back for another 13 hours.
And not just because of the giant, talking anteater.
Kingdom Hospital, it seems, was built on the site of a 19th-century disaster that claimed the lives of a lot of children. And they're haunting the place, along with something considerably more malevolent.
While they are von Trier's creations, the characters are King-like — Andrew McCarthy is the smug, heroic doctor; Bruce Davison is the obnoxious, overbearing, bigoted doctor; Ed Begley Jr. is the incompetent hospital administrator; Diane Ladd is the hypochondriac who's in touch with the dead.
The anteater is CGI.
Wednesday's premiere is almost all set-up and very little action. It's sort of creepy but not really scary.
If you sit through it, you're not going to be counting the hours until next week's episode.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com