OK, my local cable system (Comcast) finally got this series on their lineup of premium content this week. I purchased all 8 episodes and am currently up to and in 104. I am deeply disappointed with my purchase. I don't know why Stephen King allowed them to bastardize his book to hell and back. With The Stand he kept the series almost completely with the story line, but this 11/22/63 miniseries is a godawful mishmash and an almost unwatchable butchery of the book. Two examples so far, just the major ones, there are many minor ones:
1. The show cuts out the crucial bet that Jake makes on the 1958 World Series win by the Yankees, coming back from a 3-1 deficit. That bet sets into motion a chain of events that lead to the thugs almost beating him to death in the later stages of the book.
2. The series jumps from sometime in 1961 to March 25, 1963, totally omitting Sadie's mental meltdown in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Jake, for the first time, gives her the hint that he IS from the future when he tells her what Adlai Stevenson will say in the UN when he tells the Soviet representative that he is prepared to wait until hell freezes over for the Soviet response to the evidence of the missile installations in Cuba. His revealing that causes Sadie to later ask him, straight out, if he is from the future. With these crucial omissions, the book has been bastardized to hell and back. Damn! Why did SK let them do this to his book?
I am so pissed at this butchery that I am considering not watching the rest of the series. What's the point?
jamesvaught@excite.com
