Now that the final chapter is up on Hulu, it’s time to officially close the book on 11.22.63, the streaming service’s eight part adaptation of Stephen King’s blockbuster time-traveling page-turner, about an ordinary English teacher (James Franco) who travels back to the ‘60s to save JFK. Even by the author’s standards, the novel was an epic read, clocking in at nearly 900 pages. Thankfully, Hulu handed showrunner Bridget Carpenter nearly nine hours to distill the book into a satisfying — and satisfyingly faithful — series. And yet, as happens with most adaptations, some elements from the novel still fell by the wayside as the series took shape. We talked about five of the most significant page-to-screen changes with Carpenter… and got King to weigh in as well via e-mail.

A One Way Trip

Just like a long-distance runner, time-traveler Jake Epping needs a few warm-up laps before embarking on his race against a past that doesn’t want to be changed. So in the book, Jake’s plan to prevent Harry Dunning’s father from murdering his family is treated as rehearsal for the main event: preventing Oswald from shooting the President. For the series, though, Carpenter folded that side mission into Jake’s extended stay in the past, with no trip back to the future to see whether saving Harry’s family changed the janitor’s life or not. (As readers may recall, Jake returns to his time period to discover that Harry wound up dying in Vietnam.) While that change gives Jake–and, by extension, the viewer–less time to grow accustomed to the past, it also raises the dramatic stakes of his adventure. “In the book, it’s luxurious to live inside Jake’s head for those many testing months,” Carpenter explains. “But what would happen dramatically is that it would suggest that he can try this over and over, and take as long as he needed. And we didn’t want it to feel that way: it should be like, ‘You’ve got one shot. Just do it.’”

King Says: “The series could have had Jake going back to see how it turned out with Bill’s family, but only if it had run an hour or two longer, and I’m not sure that would have been worthwhile. What that return does in the book is give just one more example — a very good one — of what happens when you change the past. Jake discovers that Harry died, which should give him a clue about what’s going to happen if he stops Oswald. Did I miss it? No. What Bridget did was to streamline the narrative, and I approved.”

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Meet Bill

For much of the book, Jake’s mission is a lonely one, at least until his lady love, Sadie (Sarah Gadon), figures out what he’s up to and becomes his accomplice. While being a solitary time-changer works on the page, Carpenter realized early on in the adaptation process that Franco would benefit from having a scene partner rather than endless amounts of voiceover narration. “I love voiceovers in movies like Days of Heaven, but it’s often something that feels laconic and considered, and the series had to have the pace of a thriller. It needed to be pulsating forward. So in my first meeting with [executive producer] J.J. Abrams we agreed that Jake needed someone to talk to.”

Enter Bill, another victim of Frank Dunning’s wrath, who becomes the Robin to Jake’s Batman. Carpenter says that Bill evolved out of a minor character that appears in the novel, and was specifically modeled to function as an admiring little brother who grows up to develop a will of his own. “I thought that it would be poignant to have someone who initially would look up to Jake, and think ‘Wow, you’re the bomb!’ And then later on, he gets tired of Jake and wants his own heroic life story.” Unfortunately, Bill’s heroic story ends in tragedy, as he jumps out the window of the mental institution where his “brother” had him committed. Carpenter insists that was the character’s fate all along. “There’s no version [of the series] where Bill survives. I thought it was important that Jake have a personal sacrifice. You don’t get anything for free, and you don’t get out clean.”