TNT Airs King’s “Nightmares and Dreamscapes”

Turner Network Television went back to a tried and true television format on Wednesday night that has, regrettably, vanished from American television, the horror anthology. In addition, the network chose to adapt short stories to TV by an author who knows a little bit about horror writing, Stephen King. The result, ‘Nightmares and Dreamscapes,” was two hours of television that not only entertained but made one hopeful that quality writing and acting might replace “reality” as the next broadcasting fad.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes was a collection of 20 pieces by Mr. King published in 1993, which included new and old works, a poem, a nonfiction bit about kids and baseball (Mr. King learned much about horror because he is a Boston Red Sox fan), and a teleplay. Such a hodgepodge is inherently uneven (even Shakespeare wrote a stinker now and then, e.g. “Titus Andronicus”) but the anthology format allows actors and directors to play with the stories knowing that the price of failure is not cancellation of the program but rather a poor review and on to the next tale.

In the golden age of TV, the 1950s and early 1960s, “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits,” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” racked up huge ratings as anthologies, and they remain some of the best TV ever made. Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery” in the 1970s kept the form alive, and later “Tales from the Crypt” found the value of having more disposable characters and settings than a customary drama series does. However, the big broadcasters ahve moved away from this in favor of nonsense with Paris Hilton, Ryan Seacrest and others of dubious merit.

TNT scored decisively with two stories that suggest the entire series deserves attention. The first episode, ‘Battleground,” is a simple enough tale: a hitman kills a toy company boss, and then receives a parcel of plastic soldiers, who promptly start shooting little guns at him. The film “Small Soldiers” relied on a similar device, and there is not much here that is new, except the execution. For an entire hour, not a single word is spoken – Charlie Chaplin TV. And TNT took a real risk by airing it without commercials.

The second tale is a more traditional horror story involving an American couple who get lost in Crouch End, a real place in the London Borough of Haringey, on their way to a dinner party. Turns out it’s a thin spot between this world and the next. This journal maintains that there really is no life north of Great Portland Street until one hits Yorkshire anyway, and then only for the cricket until the train stops in Edinburgh. Be that as it may, there was a distinct “Hammer House of Horror” feel to the production, which is high praise indeed.

The network will run further installments, two at a time, on Sunday nights for the next four weeks. The idea is to make the show more of an “event” and also to protect the series from predatory programming from other networks as the fall season starts earlier and earlier. If nothing else, it’s worth recording for later viewing, as it does come up against “Deadwood.”

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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