On the show, it’s revealed early on that Ralph and his wife, Jeannie, have suffered the unimaginable loss of a child, and Price and his team have allowed this to influence the entire season for both characters.

In King’s book, Detective Ralph Anderson’s son, Derek, is absent but most definitely alive. The most notable change is to a character we don’t see or hear in either version, but who haunts the HBO iteration all the same. The narrative of both the book and show are very close to the same, but there have been some changes worth noting allow us to guide the way. The brother of the victim kills Terry, and Ralph becomes obsessed with figuring out how this conflicting evidence is possible, drawing in the assistance of a unique PI named Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo). However, Terry is also on camera miles away from the scene at the time of the murder.

Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) gets the case, and publicly arrests Maitland after overwhelming evidence, including several witnesses, security-camera footage, and eventually fingerprints and DNA. Both the book and show The Outsider are about the case of Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), a man who is accused of murdering a local boy named Frankie Peterson. How? As in any adaptation, there are minor changes throughout, like the physical appearance of supporting characters, which always changes through casting but there are also some fairly significant departures that make this version of The Outsider unique.įirst, a quick refresher. And when the first episode of The Outsider sped through basically the first third of the book, it was clear once again that things were going to be different from the source material.

Not only has King been notoriously difficult to adapt, it’s not something that would interest a writer as talented as Price if he couldn’t put his own fingerprints on it. When it was announced that HBO had tapped Richard Price to adapt Stephen King’s hit 2018 novel The Outsider for a ten-part miniseries, it was clear that the author of Clockers and co-writer of HBO’s The Night Of would be adding his own voice to the project.

Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) and Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) function in The Outsider more or less the same as in Stephen King’s 2018 novel, but significant tweaks to the characters underscore themes that are unique to the HBO miniseries.

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