Managed Health Scare

By James Poniewozik Sunday, Feb. 22, 2004
    • On Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital (ABC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.; premieres March 3, 9 p.m. E.T.), the creepiest sign of trouble at the eponymous medical center is not the ghost of a 9-year-old girl that patrols the halls. It's not the occasional earthquakes — in Maine!--that rattle the grounds when otherworldly forces are upset. It's the hospital's corporate logo, a sleek V shape with curlicues at the top, gleaming on the building's facade and twirling on its computer screensavers. After a few seconds, one realizes it's actually a stylized satanic goat's head. On Kingdom Hospital, the devil is not merely in the details. He's in the graphic design.

    King — horror author, screenwriter, jack-of-all-'fraids — based his new creation in part on the acclaimed Danish mini-series The Kingdom, by filmmaker Lars von Trier, and in part on his own long hospitalization after he was struck and nearly killed by a van in 1999. The resulting series is sometimes, draggily and dully, just what you would expect from King. Artist Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman) sees grim visions after a paralyzing accident takes him to the hospital, founded on the site of an 1869 mill fire that killed scores of child laborers. But it is also sometimes fresh, wry and even wacky. Rickman's first visitor from the other side, as he lies broken bodied on the shoulder of a country road, is a giant anteater, who offers to serve as Rickman's guide in unraveling the mystery of Kingdom's haunting. The beast warns Rickman to conserve his strength and watch for the hospital's wandering ghost girl — and licks off an ant crawling across Rickman's face. "Yum!" says the spirit creature. "Ant-solutely delish!"


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    Kingdom Hospital is really, alternately, three different shows. The first and worst is a generically creepy, borderline-camp horror show, with images of rats running across a fetid swamp and undead hands reaching up from the deep. There's a ghoulish narrator — he sounds as if he could be the host of Count Spooky's Nightmare Theater on a UHF station circa 1965--who reads lines like "This is the realm of darkness" and "The ground is uneasy, and old secrets have begun to rise to the surface." The second is a slightly ham-handed satire of corporate medicine, with Ed Begley Jr. as hospital administrator Dr. Jesse James (get it?) jazzed about the money the rich artist could pump into the hospital. (On Rickman's arrival, a nurse mentions the need to perform a "wallet biopsy" to see how he's equipped to pay for his care.) The staff includes eccentric brain surgeon Dr. Hook (Andrew McCarthy) and pompous chief neurologist Dr. Stegman (Bruce Davison). Among the patients is a psychic (Diane Ladd), who, like Rickman, is picking up weird vibes in the halls.

    The third, most unusual — and therefore scariest — show is a surprisingly playful story given that it is based on its author's near death. ABC has played up the comparisons between Kingdom Hospital and David Lynch's Twin Peaks, though Kingdom isn't as arty, original or elliptical. But like Peaks, it is funny, which is no small feat (compare HBO's smart but painfully self-serious Carnivale). Some of the best scenes seem thrown in simply because they amused King — for instance, a dig at reality TV in which we see the stoner who hit Rickman, at home, racked with guilt, watching a game show in which losing contestants are electrocuted.

    It's a kick to see King take these kinds of flights just because he's Stephen King and he can. But often he could have used an editor. There's an interminable scene of Stegman being harassed by laughing street kids that seems to exist only to tell us that no one likes him; in the second hour of the pilot, Rickman flashes back to his accident and the nightmare visions that we already saw in the first hour. But somewhere in this bloated farrago are the makings of a unique horror comedy. In this cautious age of cop dramas and dating shows, can a big network take a risk on something different? Over Stephen King's near dead body.