Except that Terry has no motive, no history of violence or cruelty toward children and even an airtight alibi. “It’s like he wanted to be caught on tape,” Ralph marvels at one point. This appears to be an open-and-shut case. Physical evidence and surveillance footage confirm these accounts, and Ralph-who’s haunted by the memory of his own dead son-stages a humiliating public arrest at one of the coach’s games. Almost immediately, he finds several eyewitnesses who point fingers at seemingly decent local teacher and baseball coach Terry Maitland ( Jason Bateman) he’s even spotted staggering away from the crime scene with blood dripping from his mouth.

When the mangled body of an 11-year-old boy, Frankie Peterson, is discovered in the woods, Ralph launches a murder investigation. By that point, viewers who don’t know the book might be ready to give up on this grim, slow, emotionally inert procedural.Īdapted by Richard Price, the author and screenwriter whose stellar resume of HBO crime dramas includes The Wire, The Night Of and most recently The Deuce, The Outsider lays out its premise in typical gritty-cop-show fashion. Sadly, she doesn’t even enter the frame until the third of 10 episodes. She may be on the autism spectrum-not that any diagnosis would explain her genius or heightened sensitivity to the supernatural. Holly, who first appeared in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, is a loner who speaks in clipped tones and wears androgynous button-downs tucked into chinos.

Delivered over beers, the awkward introduction marks the arrival of the story’s first distinctive character and draws a sharp contrast between her eccentricity and the beaten-down pragmatism of protagonist Ralph Anderson (an appropriately somber Ben Mendelsohn). The monologue would’ve made a strange, tantalizing cold open for this adaptation of the 2018 Stephen King novel.

Bill hodges trilogy the outsider