James Franco seems to have multiple projects at Sundance every year, several of which generally see him playing gay roles. But rather than coming out of the closet, Franco goes into one at the start of 11.22.63, an eight-part Hulu “event series” whose pilot premieres in Park City this week before being released on 15 February.

Franco plays Jake, an English teacher in small-town Maine who walks through the closet in his local diner and emerges in October 1960. When he returns to the spot where he landed in the past, he is transported back to the present, exactly two minutes after he left. The owner of the diner, Jake’s friend Al (Chris Cooper), explains how it works: people can go back to that spot and change things that happen in the past so that they have an impact on the present. However, if they go back again after that, all of their previous changes are erased and they end up in the same spot again.

Got it? Al has been using this portal for years to attempt to stop the assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963, the date in the title, sometimes staying in the past two or three years at a clip before returning to the present two minutes later. Based on a book by Stephen King and executive-produced by JJ Abrams, this is the ultimate baby boomer liberal fantasy. If the assassination of JFK could be stopped, the thinking goes, then Vietnam would be prevented and all the subsequent fallout and disasters that have come to pass since that date could be averted.

Since Al has cancer, he convinces Jake that he has to go back into the past and finish the work he’s started. He has files and research about all sorts of people implicated in the plot, from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA operatives and Russian émigrés. The problem is, the past doesn’t like to be changed, and when Jake attempts it he is attacked by careening cars, falling chandeliers, and an army of cockroaches bent on his destruction.

As well as being a blockbuster novelist, King is a seasoned master of mystery television and his hand is evident in the pilot script by Bridget Carpenter (formerly of Parenthood and Friday Night Lights). The knottiness of changing the past to affect the present is handled well and the scenes where the past fights back are as creepy as a graveyard on 31 October.

Franco does a great job as Jake, both more relatable and better looking than in his usual roles as a hangdog stoner or militant hipster something-or-other. Thanks to flawless art direction, the period details – the clothing, cars, hair, houseware – are as lush as Mad Men’s. The past is absolutely gorgeous, until Jake starts messing around with it.

Only the pilot was screened at Sundance, but the two-hour premiere is more than enough to lock viewers into the whole season. While 11.22.63 might sound a bit similar to Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won the second world war, in practice it’s quite distinct in both feel and execution. Unlike Amazon, Hulu has yet to see a breakout original series, but if the rest of the episodes are as good as the premiere, this look to the past could cement Hulu’s future as creative force on the small screen.