11.22.63

First off, I should say that I haven't read Stephen King's 11/22/63, the book upon which this new Hulu series is based, so I'm coming at this as a fresh newbie.

James Franco plays Jake Epping, a Maine high school teacher (shocker, right, for a Stephen King protagonist coming from Maine? Did I mention he's a writing teacher?) who is passionate about his job but is going through a divorce. We don't really learn too much about him at this point, as he's, at least at this stage, your basic everyman.

Jake frequents a funky little diner where there are $1.50 hamburgers that are shockingly good for their price. The diner is run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper, who I think the AV Club review says, accurately, would be compelling to watch even if he were just taking out the garbage for the whole episode,) who has one hell of a crazy secret.

When Jake's wife tracks him down at the diner to sign their divorce papers, Al ducks back into the back of the diner. Precisely two minutes later, he comes out looking like absolute hell, having grown a scruffy stubble-beard and coughing up blood. In those two minutes, he's gone from happy and healthy to suffering from the late stages of terminal lung cancer.

When Jake asks him to explain what happened, Al takes him into the back of the restaurant and decides to show before telling. There's a door that leads into a dark corridor that then spits Jake out into 1960. When Jake returns (presumably walking into the air-space where the doorway will one day go,) Al tells him the whole story: The portal lets him go back to the exact same day in 1960. He's been able to go there and buy cheap ground beef for his burgers (probably the same cow, actually.) While he's been using it in this oddly mundane and practical way, he's got a much larger project in mind: to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As a child of the 80s, Kennedy's assassination is a pretty settled fact in my mind - 9/11 was the huge, world-changing event of my youth. But a long-lived JFK is one of the great "What Ifs" of American History. While I have my doubts that everything would have been smooth sailing (JFK is technically the president who got us into Vietnam,) there's a kind of dream of an idealized, confidently liberal America that might have had a more thorough and painless Civil Rights Movement and one in which the middle class was not allowed to shrivel, and that dream is often tied into the idea of Kennedy surviving his Presidency.

Al certainly feels that the world would have to be better off if Kennedy had lived, and so he has gone to great pains to try to find out how to prevent the killing.

To be clear, the portal on the "modern side" moves with us at a rate of one second per second, but the "past side" is always 1960, on the exact same day. Going in resets anything you accomplished in the previous round, but that means that Al has been able to gather a hefty amount of intelligence about the events of the three years between the portal opening and the day of the assassination.

But Al is dying, and he needs Jake to finish what he started.

Thus, after some brief call-refusing, Jake arrives at Al's home to tell him he'll do it, only to find that his friend has died. Taking up his collected research, he goes into the portal, and the adventure begins.

As usual in a King story, this is far more on the fantasy side of things than science fiction, and as a result, the past - the familiar flow of history - seems to strongly want to straighten back into the way it was. As Al tells Jakes, "if you try to fuck with the past, the past will try to fuck with you." We see a few examples of this, and they're all pretty creepy.

Probably the biggest enigma right now is a man who is standing just by the portal in 1960. While every other person there goes through the same motions - some girls drive by with the same song "Just a Little Bit Longer" playing on their car, and a milkman drops a bottle, exclaiming "Oh for the love of Mike!" But there's one figure who seems to notice the differences, and he's the one who is saying "You're not supposed to be here."

Who or what that guy is has got to be one of the biggest mysteries going forward.

If you read the inaugural post on this website, you'll know that I love time travel stories. There's a moment in this episode where Jake uses his iPhone to distract a thug with an silly facebook-ready video of a bird, and I decided that yes, this show is my shit.

Despite being released through Hulu, they're sticking with a weekly release schedule, so we've only got the first episode so far of what will be, I believe, an 8-part miniseries. Stephen King adaptations can be some serious hits or serious misses, and television has often had more of the latter, but at least from the pilot, this looks like a solid hit.