HBO’s new series, The Outsider, continues Stephen King’s onscreen renaissance with a harrowing adaptation of the celebrated author’s novel. Given a prestige drama sheen, the show operates as an unflinching detective story full of twists and turns, bolstered by an all-star cast. Ben Mendelsohn and Jason Bateman both shine in their respective roles as Ralph Anderson and Terry Maitland, navigating a whirlwind of grief, horror, and a touch of the supernatural. Four episodes watched for review. Minor spoilers ahead…

The Outsider opens with the gruesome discovery of a mutilated corpse - that of a young boy. As a pair of detectives uncover the bloody scene and the child’s half-eaten remains, one asks, “Animal?” The other offers a chilling response: “No.” This simple exchange sets the tone for HBO’s latest crime thriller, adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name. On its surface, The Outsider seems to share similar DNA with the premium network’s other police thriller, True Detective; however, where True Detective’s draw lies in the esoteric charms of “time is a flat circle” and its alluring murder mystery, The Outsider is simply a dark paradox, a puzzle box enigma that begs to ask the question: What the hell is going on?

It would be misleading to categorize The Outsider as a whodunnit, because the show points an irrefutable finger at the most likely culprit within the first 20 minutes of the first episode: Georgian family man and the town’s little league coach, Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman). The evidence stacked against Maitland is staggering: multiple eyewitness accounts identify him by name and remember him being covered in blood, his fingerprints are all over the boy’s corpse, and a van recovered from the scene is teeming with incriminating DNA. And as Maitland maintains his innocence, the arresting detective, Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn, finally breaking out of his villainous typecasting), brings the case to the district attorney as a “gold-plated slam dunk.” What seems to be an open-and-shut case, however, is anything but. Despite the mountain of damning evidence piled against Maitland, he has an airtight alibi - backed by clear video footage - placing him at a teacher’s conference 70 miles away at the exact time of the boy’s murder. The question then becomes: How can someone be in two places at the same time?