More Spooky! Less renown!
Broadcast back in 2004, Kingdom Hospital was a 13 episode mini series. Adapting the story told in the Danish series, the American version similarly told the story of a hospital where the things that die don't stay dead. There was an old mill for making Civil War uniforms that burned to the ground in Maine. On that site, the original Kingdom Hospital was built...which also burned down. From the ashes came the latest iteration of the hospital, which serves as a place from which King spun a series of interconnected stories revolving around the doctors and patients in the haunted hospital. There are mysteries to be solved, wrongs to be righted and deaths to be avenged over the course of the series, most of which hold together fairly well.
That's kind of the rub of the series, though. I certainly enjoyed it during my first experience watching it, essentially using it as a stop-gap while Lost went into re-reuns. It was a bit of spooky serialized TV that kept my attention and dealt in the macabre. After the fact, though, I felt underwhelmed. I watched it the first time through and haven't had the wherewithal to revisit it in its entirety. I feel like I ought to, as though I should give the series another spin and see if it still has the same charm it did almost ten years ago.
There was a series-spanning arc about a little girl whose ghost is known to all the residents of the hospital, as well as some strange inhuman forces, not all of them benevolent. Individual stories, like a ball player and his shot at redemption, are nice distractions but I'm sure they were maddening when this was broadcast week-to-week. I caught the whole thing in one shot on DVD, which is by far the preferred way to view Kingdom Hospital - you can string a couple episodes together to get a better sense of the overall plot and character development. I read online that the show was a shadow of Twin Peaks, and in a way I agree with that assessment. It's not that the show was seriously flawed, it was more that it struggled to make effective use of a premise so rich with potential. Haunted hospital produced by King! How could that go wrong? Still, the results felt muddled.
I know this isn't the strongest recommendation for a series that I've enjoyed, but you should watch for yourself and make your own judgement. Kingdom Hospital certainly has some spooky and engaging moments, they just felt too few and far between. It could be too dreary and heavy handed. It still had some cool characters and settings, though. Creepy stuff for fall. Add it to your to-watch list and see if I'm off base. You might dig it like I did.
Yeah, still doing TV here, only now we get off the beaten path into the more obscure. Less famous, more ghoulish. As much as I love Twin Peaks, I have to write about something else. So yesterday we looked at a legendary cult show. Let's flip that idea on its head and use today's Spooky Month post to look at a show that was little known, but just as deserving of a chance. I'm talking about the Stephen King-produced adaptation of Lars Von Trier's Riget, Kingdom
