Every Stephen King TV Show, Ranked Worst to Best

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – June 3, 2021

Originally a reluctant convert to television, best-selling horror author Stephen King has seen over two dozen projects bearing his name reach the small screen over the past 40+ years, from Salem's Lot to the just-launched Lisey's Story. While most of these have been adaptations of King's novels and stories, a few were wholly new projects written by the author directly for TV. Some have been deeply mediocre at best, but quite a few of King's TV shows have received a warm welcome from critics.

In the gallery on this page, we rank every Stephen King series from worst to best by Metascore, reflecting the critical consensus at the time of each show's debut. Miniseries are included alongside conventional TV shows, but made-for-TV movies are excluded.

16 of 26 photo by Lionsgate Home Entertainment

65 The Dead Zone (USA, 2002–07)

Based on the novel The Dead Zone (1979)

[tied for #10] Running for six seasons (and 80 episodes) on cable's USA Network after first being developed by UPN, The Dead Zone was created by the father-and-son duo of Michael and Shawn Piller, both veterans of multiple Star Trek series in the 1990s. Their show was a sci-fi drama centering on the character of Johnny Smith from King's 1979 novel. Played in the series by Anthony Michael Hall, the TV version of Smith (like the one in the novel and a 1983 feature film adaptation by David Cronenberg that starred Christopher Walken) is a small-town schoolteacher who awakens after a multi-year coma (caused by a car crash) as a changed man—one who now has psychic powers that enable him to see past and future events. Deep Space Nine's Nicole de Boer also stars as Smith's one-time fiancée and (in a switch from the book) the mother of his child, while Sean Patrick Flanery plays the villainous politician Greg Stillson.

“It's not science fiction, but it's about a hero's journey through the weird and the wondrous.” —M.S. Mason, The Christian Science Monitor

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