Qs & As: Stephen King's 11/22/63: Which is Better, the Novel or the Miniseries?

As a writer/reader, I’ve learned over the years to stop expecting book-to-movie adaptations to recreate novels, short stories, plays, or Broadway musicals with 100% fidelity. It is a nearly impossible task to translate a medium - such as literature - that concerns itself mostly with the internal, mental, and emotional processes of a story’s characters perfectly into another medium (film or TV) that is mostly visual and needs imagery and motion to tell a story.

I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s 2011 novel. It was the first King novel I bought after a long drought (nearly 10 years) since I had bothered to get one of his books (Wizard and Glass). But when I found out that Stephen King had written a time travel story in which the protagonist’s task is to prevent JFK’s assassination, I was eager to see how Steve-O would pull that rabbit out of his magician’s hat.

I read the novel in less than a week - a miracle of sorts, because at the time I had a lot going on in my life, most of it unpleasant. I enjoyed the hell out of that book, and I wrote a rave review about 11/22/63 for the now-defunct review site Epinions.

I was also excited when I saw on the web that Jonathan Demme was interested in making a film version of King’s novel. I didn’t see how well that would go; 11/22/63 is a fairly substantial novel with many subplots and in-universe references to other King novels. It would require at least a three-hour feature film, and even then the story would have to be stripped down to its core elements.

Unsurprisingly, not too long after I’d read that Demme was working with King on the Herculean task of adapting 11/22/63 to the big screen, I learned that Demme had parted ways with King and the adaptation due to “creative differences.” (The main source of conflict between the director and the writer was the all-important question of what to include in the feature film and what to leave out.)

To make a long story short, I suspected that if the novel were to be adapted, it had to be a miniseries. Otherwise, any attempt to cram the “basics” of 11/22/63 into a two-hour movie would just piss off the novel’s fans.

As for the miniseries, I’ll say this much. The best way to watch it is to do so without nitpicking at the differences between the source novel and the J.J. Abrams/Stephen King/Bridget Carpenter production. 11.22.63 works well for what it is - a story told primarily through an audio-visual medium.

I like them both. Each version of the story has its particular charms, but they work well as works in two different media.