We’re big fans of time travel stories here on TG, and Stephen King wrote one titled “11/22/63,” the fateful day when Kennedy was killed.
This was also a fascinating element of The Dead Zone, where a man could see into the future and realizes a politician is going to start Armageddon. What would any of us do in that situation where we could potentially save the world, but we’d have to assassinate someone to do it?
Now it looks like 11/22/63 will also be headed to television, with the help of JJ Abrams’s production company, Bad Robot. As Collider and Deadline confirm, negotiations are currently underway to do 11/22/63 as a series on cable, or potentially as a mini-series. Much like in The Dead Zone, in 11/22/63 a teacher goes back into the past to try and prevent the Kennedy assassination.
This isn’t the first time plans were underway to adapt 11/22/63. At one point, Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Something Wild) was up to direct it as a feature, but according to The Onion, he left the project after it was in development for a year. “I loved certain part of the book for the film more than Stephen did,” Demme said. “We’re friends, and I had a lot of fun working on the script, but we were too apart on what we felt should be in and what should be out of the script.”
As much as Demme would be a great director for this, we’re definitely curious to see what JJ Abrams could do with it as well. Many of King’s novels are too lengthy to do within a big screen feature length, and it will be interesting to see how this and Under the Dome will translate with a longer TV arc.
King’s work has been adapted for television since 1979’s Salem’s Lot, but it will also be cool to see what an actual series based on his work will be like. We’re also looking forward to seeing a King story could look like on TV in the era of great genre television like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
In addition to taking on 11/22/63, Abrams also just got some more good news for one of his TV shows, Revolution, which has officially been renewed by NBC for a 22-episode commitment in the network’s 2013-14 season. While it had a dip in the ratings several weeks back, Revolution’s held steady enough to get the green light for another go-round, which is good because soon we’ll find out what caused the blackout, and we’re dying to see what else the show has in store down the road.
