Then Jake’s good friend, a diner owner named Al Templeton (Chris Cooper), collapses of cancer-related exhaustion, reveals his disease to Jake, and asks him to take over for him as a time pilgrim, traveling through a portal in a closet of his home and entering 1960. We see horrific glimpses of the crime in flashback. The pilot starts with an older man named Harry Dunning (Leon Rippy) telling Jake about how his mother and sister were murdered by his father on Halloween night in 1960.

11.22.63 is mainly about telling stories and listening to stories, and the empathetic transfer that happens when the listener really feels what the speaker is saying, and the danger of the listener wanting not merely to help the speaker by validating his experiences but by directly intervening in his life - a gesture that can lead not to resolution but more complications, or disaster.Īlthough it gets cooking as a thriller eventually, the first three hours are a protracted detour - or feel like one. But this mini-series is not either of those things, exactly. I went into it with arms folded because I’ve seen lot of time-travel stories and a lot of conspiracy thrillers. Kennedy, but after a while you relax (or should) and accept that it’s pursuing its own peculiar agenda, and it’s not quite what you thought. It makes you wonder why it’s spending so much time on stories other than its main tale of a writer named Jake Epping (James Franco) traveling back in time to try to stop the assassination of President John F.

11.22.63, a Hulu production based on Stephen King’s novel, is a sneakily involving mini-series.

Stephen king 11 22 63 review