By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Throw a rock and you’ll hit a Stephen King adaptation. Welcome to Derry, The Shining, IT, Carrie, Misery, Rose Red, there’s over 80 films alone, and nearly as many television shows. It’s understandable that some would fall through the cracks. Kingdom Hospital is a unique case since it’s adapting a Dutch series, The Kingdom by Lars von Trier, but the version that aired on ABC in 2004 was developed by King. You can tell because now the haunted hospital is located in Maine, or rather, you would be able to tell, if it was streaming anywhere.
Kingdom Hospital Is Stephen King Working Through Some Trauma
The other clue that Stephen King was involved is the addition to the story of Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman, you know him from Heroes), an artist trapped in a coma following a car accident. Unconscious, Rickman is trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead, which as it turns out, Kingdom Hospital is very, very haunted. King was only a few years removed from the horrible accident that nearly killed him, and you can tell he’s still working through some of the trauma.
King kept Kingdom Hospital close to the source material. There’s secret organizations, a dark history tied to the land the hospital is built on, and plenty of medical scenes that would seem normal in any hospital drama. There’s hook ups, or rather attempts, turns out that morgues don’t make for a great dinner date, white collar crimes, professional jealousy, everything found in a medical drama, but there’s also headless corpses, a giant anteater demon-thing, and a world-ending catastrophe that must be stopped.
The series ran for only 13 episodes, and it tells a complete story. Kingdom Hospital was never going to be an ongoing series. That’s a good thing considering the uneven tone of the show which feels like it’s missing something. There’s not enough comedy despite some offbeat setups, and never enough horror even with the multiple hauntings. By sticking to the middle it’s a perfectly fine series that’s entirely unremarkable in anyway.
A Creative Swing And A Miss
Considering the quality of some Stephen King adaptations, unremarkable puts it above about a dozen of them that are downright horrible, yet watching Kingdom Hospital will make you think everything, from the story to the individual performances, is slightly off. Audiences at the time thought the same, with the pilot debuting to anemic ratings before the whole series was delayed because of the NBA Finals, leading to it limping to a conclusion in the dregs of Summer.
Kingdom Hospital’s tone and pacing is off-base and there’s not a lot of demand for the series online these days. It at least dared to try something different. Putting a layer of supernatural insanity on top of the staid medical drama is a formula that should work. The biggest problem behind the series wasn’t Stephen King, a man who tends to go further with an idea whenever possible, but the network: ABC. Network television only lets you get away with so much, and in this case, it wasn’t nearly enough.
Kingdom Hospital is available on an out-of-print DVD, but is otherwise off every streaming service thanks to its complicated production. Lars Von Trier owns part of it, there are multiple companies and international broadcast rights involved, all of that is even before trying to clear the licensing hurdles for the music. If it’s ever available again, clear out 10 hours from the schedule and binge. A creative miss will always be more amusing than another creatively bankrupt procedural or derivative mess we’ve seen hundreds of times.
