If you stripped away every Stephen King reference from Castle Rock, what would remain beneath the layers of superficial fan service? At the conclusion of its first season, Hulu’s newest original series has left viewers with plenty of Easter eggs and intrigue but little substance.

Co-created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, Castle Rock is not an adaptation of any one, specific Stephen King story. Rather, it’s an anthology series inspired by the characters and themes of King’s past works, synthesized into an original story and dropped into the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine – referred to or featured prominently in King classics like IT, The Dead Zone, Cujo, and The Shawshank Redemption.

While the Stephen King Cinematic Universe may be a new concept, devout King fans will undoubtedly recognize the sound of a shared multiverse from his literary canon. Characters, locations and supernatural elements frequently reappear across the parallel worlds of King’s stories, implying that they’re all somehow connected.

Castle Rock isn’t as interested in connecting these pieces, though. Instead, it sets out to tell a new tale – lawyer Henry Deaver (Andre Holland) returns to his hometown after a nameless inmate, known only as “The Kid” (Bill Skarsgård), mysteriously appears in an abandoned prison wing, setting off a chain of death, violence, and unexplained phenomenon throughout the town.

Without even mentioning the name “Castle Rock,” the basic premise has a rather strong hook in its central mysteries. At some point, though, someone must have decided that the bones of whatever this show may have been weren’t strong enough to satisfy Hulu’s ambitions for zeitgeist penetration and subscriber acquisition. Or more importantly, there was no brand name attached to it.

Because in 2018, unless you’re like HBO or Netflix with enough accrued brand loyalty to consistently experiment on original content, the odds of developing a hit series not based on any pre-exiting intellectual property (IP) are not particularly promising. With over 500 scripted series airing this year alone, “peak TV” has left audiences with an exponentially increasing number of programming hours and a disproportionate amount of free time for consumption.

The importance, then, of being able to sell a new series on its poster becomes invaluable. “From Stephen King” undoubtedly creates more interest among passive, prospective viewers than “From the creators of WGN America’s Manhatthan.”

That isn’t even a shot at Shaw and Thomason’s credentials. It’s simply the reality for artists vying for attention in this wild West of over-the-top TV. If Hulu or any other content provider has any chance of competing in today’s infinitely expanding sea of streaming services, this is the game they’ll have to play.

So the prison, which operates as a primary set piece for Castle Rock’s first half, becomes Shawshank State Prison. The former town sheriff transforms into Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn) from Needful Things. Supporting female character #2 assumes the name Jackie Torrance (Jane Levy) after King’s infamous psychopath from The Shining. Add one part “childhood trauma”, two parts “paranormal evil”, mix well and voila – a new Stephen King story is born.

Before sounding the death knell of TV as we know it, media property manipulation by massive entertainment companies isn’t a new or exclusively harmful idea. Television and film studios have been mining the IP of writers and other content machines for decades, often to great success. Just look at FX’s Fargo, which helped launch, if not function as the catalyst for modern TV anthologies and episodic series based loosely on prior franchises.

The real issue arises when this type of IP stewardship becomes an afterthought instead of an essential ingredient. As voluminous as the King allusions were this season, they ultimately served no greater purpose towards the overall mythology of the series – why does Jackie bear the Torrance name other than to pander to King’s longtime readers?

For some fans, though, the lack of connective tissue may not matter. Because if you knew what to look for, you were greatly rewarded with the satisfaction of noticing a familiar name or incident from King’s bibliography. “I understood that reference!”, you said.

That is, until the dopamine hit of self-gratification wore off, because each cheeky fourth-wall break appeared for a brief moment, only to be gone the next. The result is a collection of Easter eggs that more closely resembles Stephen King’s version of Ready Player One than a fully realized series.

If you don’t particularly consider yourself a “Kinghead,” most, if not all of these references may have flown right over your head, leaving you to focus on the show’s burning questions – what really happened to Henry Deaver as a boy that made him leave town? Who is “The Kid,” and how did he wind up in Shawshank? Unfortunately, Castle Rock didn’t seem interested in answering these questions either.

In the absence of any meaningful plot advancement, much of this first season felt like an overlong, ten-hour mood reel. Successful horror, especially of the psychological variety, depends largely on crafting an intangible feeling of dread and vulnerability for its protagonist(s) and thereby, the audience. But atmosphere is only one instrument in a larger box of storytelling tools – it can’t be a crutch. And Castle Rock allocated a wildly uneven portion of its resources towards aping the tone of King’s creepy prose with little regard for effective character development and narrative pacing.

Advocates of the series may counter and point to an episode like “The Queen”, which has been praised for its bottle-episode structure and focus on Ruth’s (Sissy Spacek) battle with dementia. Despite an Emmy-worthy performance from Spacek, the episode itself still suffered from the same flaws that plagued the rest of the season by once again derailing any forward momentum that may have been amassed from the prior six episodes.

Such a detour from the main narrative wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if the entire season was arranged in the same episodic, vignette image. But when so much of the audience’s investment hinged on closure from the pilot’s inciting incidents, the farther episodes strayed from resolution, the more subsequent material adopted a chore-like property.

At least with “The Queen”, it marked the first time that Shaw and Thomason even tried to say anything at all. It was just a bit too late. And that may actually be Castle Rock’s biggest problem – its inability to make a statement about the universe it occupies and why it is the way it is.

What causes the characters in King’s stories to be so ostensibly accursed? Is there some malevolent, cosmic force pulling the strings of their lives with vengeful wrath – could it be a fictional Stephen King himself? There’s no right answer, but an attempt to at least explore the deeper, even meta-commentary of King’s lore could have elevated Castle Rock beyond it’s ultimately hollow final product.

It’s that just-missing-the-mark quality that makes Castle Rock’s shortcomings all the more frustrating, because it could have been great. Sprinkled throughout the season were these tiny moments of magic, so fleeting, it was entirely possible to miss them. They were a window into an alternate reality where maybe this wasn’t a Stephen King story.

Maybe it stood on its own as a truly original concept that explored the troubled lives of those within an idyllic town corrupted by a supernatural evil. Maybe each episode was like “The Queen” – isolating a single primary character and analyzing their personal traumas. Or maybe it was always a King story that surrendered to its maximum potential weirdness and took risks regardless of the associated IP.

The nice thing about being an anthology is that Castle Rock can choose any of the above moving forward. Free from the baggage of loose threads and continuity concerns, Hulu has a clean slate to begin anew next season. With a polarizing finale still fresh, some fans may be disappointed at the lack of a definitive conclusion from Season One’s biggest mysteries. But the finality of now opens the door for the possibility of what-can-be.

Whether Shaw and Thomason return to the drawing board or stay the course, that remains to be seen. One thing is certain, though: by the time Season Two rolls around, even more adaptations, reboots, and reimaginings will have sprouted up, many of which will likely be King-related.

Shouldn’t Hulu strive to set the example by which all other competitors and imitators follow? To prove that creativity can exist within the studio machine in spite of Hollywood’s franchise obsession – that the words and ideas of a master like Stephen King are worth more than the financial value assigned to his intellectual property.