Flat, frightless 'Hospital' series is dead on arrival
Writing, narration by Stephen King can't keep premiere from disappointing
"Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital" is as scary as a child's jack-in-the-box, unless your definition of horror involves a pair of Coke-bottle glasses and -- boo! -- Diane Ladd.
Like a high school Halloween theatrical, the new 13-episode series strains to be eerie with a roster of dime-store fright tricks. Power failures at the titular hospital, a faulty elevator, a psychic who sees ghosts, the silhouette of a dead girl on a video monitor -- they're all telling us to move to the edge of our seats, rather than just putting us there. And they're telling us very slowly, as ABC hopes to stretch the cliches into a more genuinely spooky realm known as May sweeps.
The slight allure of the series, which has its two-hour premiere tonight at 9, is the King in "Kingdom" -- the much-hyped autobiographical material from writer and executive producer Stephen King. After buying the rights to Lars von Trier's Danish miniseries "The Kingdom" (which will screen at the Harvard Film Archive on March 30 and 31), King reworked the property into a story inspired by his own nightmarish experience in the medical system after his 1999 near-fatal accident. Not only does "Kingdom Hospital" recreate King's bloody mishap, in which he was struck by a van, it gives us a staff of doctors who span a spectrum ranging from arrogant (Andrew McCarthy) and greedy (Ed Begley Jr.) to vile (Bruce Davison). While medical series such as "ER" make doctors into contemporary heroes, "Kingdom Hospital" quite simplistically demonizes its cynical healers. As a critique of the corporatizing of medicine, it is unsubtle.
King's alter ego is a famous painter named Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman, who was Stephen Carrington No. 2 on "Dynasty"), whom we see on the cover of a magazine with the caption "Peter Rickman: Sometimes Great Art Does Sell." Let's hope that's one of King's inside jokes, along with allusions to "Carrie" and characters named Johnny B. Goode and Jesse James. In general, the humor in "Kingdom Hospital" isn't sharp or fully realized, even when it involves a sly anteater that figures into Rickman's art and his post-accident hallucinations. As Rickman lies by the road after he has been brutally slammed and abandoned, the creature licks an ant off his face and murmurs, "Ant-solutely de-lish." How about ant-solutely un-punny?
These surreal segments, which continue while Rickman lies in the hospital, have the potential to create a "Singing Detective"-like inner journey for the patient, who can move only his eyes. But, at least in the premiere, the flat visions don't add up to much more than gratuitous opportunities to play with digital imagery.
The strange goings-on at the oddly underpopulated institution aren't all in Rickman's head. Kingdom Hospital is built on the site of an 1869 mill fire in which many child laborers perished, and some of their ghosts are still in residence. At one point, in an image overused in the horror genre, we see cadaverous hands reaching up from the dirt. We also see a few scenes in which Ladd's flaky psychic, a patient at the hostpital, overhears sounds of the undead.
Don't worry, I'm not giving away plot developments. Rather than let the truth about the hospital site emerge gradually through the story, King delivers the kind of voiceover that desperately wants to creep us out and ends up sounding like Count Chocula. "Perhaps the ground Kingdom Hospital stands on is still uneasy," he says in the opening voiceover, "for the cold and damp have returned." OK, we're scared. Now dude, what have you done with Boo Berry?
By giving "Kingdom Hospital" a 13-episode run, ABC is experimenting with the more concentrated approach that has helped put HBO's original series on the map. But a short season isn't going to solve the network's seemingly endless search for a successful drama. And neither is a spiritless ghost story whose EKG is flat from the get-go.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.
KINGDOM HOSPITAL
Starring: Jack Coleman, Diane Ladd, Andrew McCarthy, Julian Richings, Ed Begley Jr., Bruce Davison
On: ABC, Ch.5
Time: Tonight, 9-11
