HBO 'The Outsider' review: Stephen King meets 'X-Files,' and it works

Jason Bateman, America’s Sweetheart, takes an unexpected step into horror as a producer and director of, and actor in, “The Outsider,” a miniseries adaptation of the 2018 Stephen King novel premiering Sunday on HBO. “There are times when looking at a series of seemingly impossible yet distinctly connected events,” private investigator Holly Gibney suggests to the Scoobys, “when the facts before you are so filled with uncanny coincidences that perhaps the first step to seeing things clearly is not to find a way to dismiss those facts but to expand your sense of what reality might entail.” A character imported from King’s hard-boiled “Bill Hodges” trilogy, which came to television as the Audience series “Mr. What’s most pleasant, if that’s the word, about “The Outsider” is its emphasis on classic ordinary-mortal shoe-leather investigation — no supercomputers or genius hackers getting results at warp speed, relatively little action even advanced by telephone. Additionally, Price weeds out King’s compulsive pop-cultural citations and literary nods — including one, in the novel, to Bateman’s Netflix series “Ozark” — while such references as he provides himself tend to be amusingly antiquated.