As we step ever closer to the event horizon of Stephen King properties, soon all will be drawn in. Right now you could be watching MGM+’s The Institute, catching The Life of Chuck in theaters, watching trailers for The Running Man and The Long Walk, seeing The Monkey on Hulu in a week, and getting psyched for Mike Flannagan’s forthcoming Carrie series, and potentially his The Dark Tower series, and I’m bound to be missing a bunch of stuff. But the most imminently interesting project is HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, which just received a new trailer.
Stephen King’s Maine contains two fictional cities that his books have returned to again and again over the years: Castle Rock and Derry. The former had its own pretty decent two-season TV series between 2018 and 2019, with a fantastic cast including Sissy Spacek, Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins, Melanie Lynskey and Bill Skarsgård. This October, we’re a couple of towns over, to the home of everyone’s favorite party clown, Pennywise.
Created as a prequel to the events of It, Welcome to Derry is a sort of origin story for the book’s monstrous clown. Intended to be three seasons (although this of course requires HBO to allow anything a chance to tell its story), the first is set in 1962, while the second will be in 1935 and the third in 1908. Intriguing.
The show has been co-developed by Andy Muschietti, who directed both of the recent It movies, and Bill Skarsgård (yes, him again) will reprise his role as Pennywise, so it’s clearly set in the same universe as those very successful films. Beyond that, not a great deal is known, beyond the clues pulled from this new trailer.
Obviously there’s to be more than just the clown’s antics. The trailer talks of a more complicated town, and there are lots of glimpses of other supernatural events taking place. However, given the time it’s set, it seems unlikely to incorporate the many other stories King has set in the area. Derry is also the home of Secret Window, Secret Garden (a stunning novella and a pretty dreadful Johnny Depp movie), Bag of Bones, Dreamcatcher, 11/22/63 and my personal all-time favorite King novel, Insomnia. Oh dear god please someone try to develop that book as a TV series—it’s surely the only King novel no one’s ever tried, and given it overlaps with It, Bag of Bones, Gerald’s Game, Pet Sematary, and most of all, The Dark Tower, it seems like it’d be an incredible project! (Although if Ralph Roberts doesn’t appear as a younger man in Welcome to Derry, I will lose my faith in the universe.)
We only have a few months to wait to see if HBO’s series can live up to expectations. In the meantime, make sure to watch both of Muschietti’s It movies (it was split into two because the book is enormous)—given the plan is to tell the entire story chronologically backwards, it definitely makes sense to start with the films.
.
