History gets a do-over in Hulu’s engrossing ‘11.22.63’
King’s 2011 novel has been adapted for an engaging eight-hour miniseries premiering on Monday, Feb. 15, on Hulu— President’s Day (Maybe Hulu’s programming department could use a do-over on that one).
[...] the past is a formidable adversary, as Jake soon learns when he falls through the portal and arrives three years ahead of November 1963.
Once Oswald (Daniel Webber) is back in Texas with his Russian wife Marina (Lucy Fry) and met at the airport by his overprotective mother Marguerite (Cherry Jones), Jake and Bill track his every move.
If they are able to get Oswald arrested when he makes an assassination attempt on right-wing Gen. Edwin Walker (Gregory North), they can keep him from killing Kennedy.
The plot gets intentionally sidetracked along the way, as Jake meets and falls in love with a pretty school librarian named Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon).
What he doesn’t know until he gets Back to the Future (so to speak, because, yes, the miniseries evokes memories of that film franchise, but with a delicious Stephen King twist) is when you change the past, you change everything that comes after that.
Bridget Carpenter’s solid adaptation of King’s novel refracts the “butterfly effect” theme through Jake’s relationship with Sadie and his effort to keep Manning from killing most of his family.
Director Kevin McDonald elicits strong performances from the supporting cast, especially Cooper, Duhamel, Webber, Gadon and Mackay, but Franco is only intermittently convincing as the time-traveling English teacher.
Costumes, cars, signage, music, hairstyles, language and, most important, social and political attitudes have been recreated to convincing perfection.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle.
First episode available for streaming on Monday, Feb. 15, on Hulu.