Kingdom Hospital

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]

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.”

If you sit through it, you're not going to be counting the hours until next week's episode.

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.

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]

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.