- Network: ABC
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 3, 2004
Critic Reviews
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To find a network drama that bears sustained comparison to ABC's Kingdom Hospital, you'd have to go all the way back to 1990, when the same network premiered David Lynch's "Twin Peaks." Alternately random and brilliant, the 15-hour, limited-run series "Kingdom Hospital" has a similarly indescribable vibe. Set in a huge Maine hospital, it plays like a cross of "M*A*S*H," "Six Feet Under" and "The Shining." King, his talented ensemble cast and his capable director, Craig R. Baxley, have created one of the creepiest locales in TV history. But they don't limit themselves to mere spookiness. They go wherever they please, and their brazen confidence demands that we follow along. [3 March 2004, p.39]
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A juicy, jauntily anarchic production.
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With a nice array of kooks, mad men, beasts and ghosts, we get the usual trail mix of King characters. Best of all, in a TV series we escape King’s biggest flaw – his refusal to self edit. Every movie turns into a miniseries when an hour would do just fine.
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Its two-hour premiere is long on creepiness and somewhat short on plot development. But with the overemphasis of late on copycat reality, it's a welcome addition to primetime, indeed. [3 March 2004]
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For ABC, Kingdom Hospital is a high-stakes experiment. It is meant to run for 13 episodes, just like an HBO series. It won't be back next season. You're meant to watch it now and admire its daring and imagination. There is much to admire but a lot of padding, too.
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Kingdom Hospital is its own, slightly crazy thing. And in a world being overrun by the sleazoid zombie gremlins of reality TV, that's not all bad.
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Leaving aside King's peculiar nostalgia for the Middle Ages, the two-hour premiere of Kingdom Hospital, though a little long on weird affectations and a little short on story line, establishes an appropriately spooky atmosphere at the hospital and deftly sketches its main characters. [3 March 2004, p.4E]
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When it isn't beating us about the head with the "supernatural," Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital has the potential to be a pretty good television show. Unfortunately, this new ABC series muddies a solid human story with the usual, a whole lot of ominous words disappearing from walls and ghosts appearing in hallways, and the unusual but ineffectual, a talking anteater who communicates on behalf of the undead. [3 March 2004, p.C1] Instead of being allowed to feel characters' fear, we're shown all the supposedly scary things right away. They become as familiar as the medical staff, just a touch more menacing than Ed Begley Jr. ("St. Elsewhere") as a cynical administrator.[3 March 2004, p.C1]
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The quietly disturbing, darkly comic masterpiece has been refashioned into something slick and stylized -- one that looks like Disney’s Haunted Mansion, but sounds like “Days of Our Lives.”
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If you sit through it, you're not going to be counting the hours until next week's episode.
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There are enough positive signs in the two-hour premiere that I'll probably take a look ... when the series moves to its regular time period.
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Beyond Rickman, however, the series offers little more than a stale buffet of recycled King ghouls and refried hospital types from every dark medical drama that ever aired from M*A*S*H to ER. Chief among these characters is Dr. Hook (Andrew McCarthy), the cynical, anti-authority neurosurgeon who operates on Rickman. Call him Hawkeye. Tonight's two-hour pilot works to a limited extent only because of the Rickman story line. The big question is where can the miniseries go during the next 10 weeks? [3 March 2004]
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This peculiar project — at times spooky but, at least initially, never remotely scary — is going to have to get significantly better fast to put any kind of a dent in “Law & Order” and make Mouse House execs feel sanguine about its Nielsen life signs.
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Its plot unfolds disjointedly and without enough suspense. And that leaves viewers with plenty of time to decide that life is too short to heed the interior monologues of four-footed creatures, even if they are hallucinations.
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Kingdom does have a few frightening moments, but they don't compensate for the lackluster performances, the absence of character development, humor or pacing, or the wild fluctuations in tone. [3 March 2004]
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By the time the first episode of Kingdom Hospital is over, viewers are likely already to have checked out. [2 March 2004, p.79]
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Ghosts aren't Kingdom Hospital's biggest problem. What this movie needed was an editor with the ability to exorcise dusty cliches.
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A befuddled retirement party for King's clichés. From start to finish, the show dodders about like an Alzheimer's patient on a scavenger hunt.
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At least "Twin Peaks" was fascinating when it first began. Kingdom Hospital is not. It's just more simplistic horror hash from a tired and shameless old slinger. If only he would pick up the pace, and things would actually happen.
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Oh, if only television critics could be like Simon Cowell on "American Idol." I could declare Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital positively dreadful, and viewers would never have to see it again. [29 Feb 2004]
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Based on the two-hour premiere, a hodgepodge of false dramatic starts, bad acting, rambling scenes, a stupendously annoying narrator and a metaphorical anteater that looks like, of all things, ALF, there's only one conclusion to draw: Those things aren't scary. They're stupid.
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Among new series this season, Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital is the biggest disappointment, a botch of monumental proportions. Next to it, NBC's misbegotten Coupling looks quaint. [29 Feb 2004, p.4]
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A spiritless ghost story whose EKG is flat from the get-go.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 3
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Mixed: 0 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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Apr 26, 2015