Word: kingdoms
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...Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital (ABC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.; premieres March 3, 9 p.m. E.T.), the creepiest sign of trouble at the eponymous medical center is not the ghost of a 9-year-old girl that patrols the halls. It's not the occasional earthquakes--in Maine!--that rattle the grounds when otherworldly forces are upset. It's the hospital's corporate logo, a sleek V shape with curlicues at the top, gleaming on the building's facade and twirling on its computer screensavers. After a few seconds, one realizes it's actually a stylized satanic goat's head...
King--horror author, screenwriter, jack-of-all-'fraids--based his new creation in part on the acclaimed Danish mini-series The Kingdom, by filmmaker Lars von Trier, and in part on his own long hospitalization after he was struck and nearly killed by a van in 1999. The resulting series is sometimes, draggily and dully, just what you would expect from King. Artist Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman) sees grim visions after a paralyzing accident takes him to the hospital, founded on the site of an 1869 mill fire that killed scores of child laborers. But it is also sometimes fresh...
...Kingdom Hospital is really, alternately, three different shows. The first and worst is a generically creepy, borderline-camp horror show, with images of rats running across a fetid swamp and undead hands reaching up from the deep. There's a ghoulish narrator--he sounds as if he could be the host of Count Spooky's Nightmare Theater on a UHF station circa 1965--who reads lines like "This is the realm of darkness" and "The ground is uneasy, and old secrets have begun to rise to the surface." The second is a slightly ham-handed satire of corporate medicine, with...
...third, most unusual--and therefore scariest--show is a surprisingly playful story given that it is based on its author's near death. ABC has played up the comparisons between Kingdom Hospital and David Lynch's Twin Peaks, though Kingdom isn't as arty, original or elliptical. But like Peaks, it is funny, which is no small feat (compare HBO's smart but painfully self-serious Carnivale). Some of the best scenes seem thrown in simply because they amused King--for instance, a dig at reality TV in which we see the stoner who hit Rickman, at home, racked with...
...bands as opposed to a lot of the smaller bands that are just as good but aren’t getting as much attention because [they] don’t have the pages to devote to [them]. There is definitely more turnover [in the United Kingdom]. That definitely worked in our favor...