{"id":24139,"date":"2025-07-25T23:02:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T23:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/24139\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T23:02:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T23:02:07","slug":"revenge-of-the-nerds-stephen-king-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/24139\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge of the Nerds: Stephen King Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

The great thing about being a Stephen King<\/a> fan \u2013 or \u201cconstant readers\u201d as we call ourselves \u2013 is that the iconic horror writer is not just unnervingly prolific, he\u2019s also a Hollywood darling. You never have to wait long for new King material, whether it\u2019s a novel or story collection from the master himself, or yet another adaptation of his work for screens large or small. King fandom is stocked with an abundance of riches, mixed with not a few lumps of petrified horse dung. The latest of these is The Institute<\/a>, based on the novel of the same name, now a streaming series on the nascent MGM+<\/a> platform. Question is, will it be a Shawshank, or a Dreamcatcher<\/a>? Diamonds or horse apples? And most importantly\u2026will it be scary?<\/p>\n

For the uninitiated, The Institute<\/a> introduces us to an intellectually and psychically gifted young boy named Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman), whom a nefarious snatch squad kidnaps in his bed in the dead of night and brings him to the eponymous institution, where its brutal staff performs terrifying biological experiments on telepathic and psychokinetic children. The objective, we later learn, is to enhance their psychic abilities and employ them somehow to save the world, or at least that\u2019s what the director Miss Sigsby (Mary-Louise Parker) leads us to believe.<\/p>\n

In short order, Luke befriends his fellow young captives, including a nurturing telepath named Kalisha (Simone Miller), nerdy psychokinetic George (Arlen So), and the older, handsome, rebel-with-a-cause teen Nicky (Fionn Laird). We follow Luke through the first few episodes as he attempts to figure out where he is, what the rules are, what awful things are going to happen to him, and, most importantly, how the hell he might break out. Not that this is an easy task, given that the staff is unsparing in their use of violence both physical and psychological.<\/p>\n

As in the book, the series gives us a split storyline between the kids at the Institute and the journey of a disgraced cop, Tim Jamison (Ben Barnes), who takes a night patrol job in a sleepy rural town that just happens to be right next door to this ultra-secretive\u00a0 facility. Jamison\u2019s role is more prominent here than the book, but the elements are the same. We see him heroically break up a robbery and save a man\u2019s life, while remaining too charming and modest to take credit for it. He also shows kindness to the town\u2019s homeless kook, Annie (Mary Walsh), whose conspiracy rantings turn out to be alarmingly true, as she tries in vain to warn the town about the nearby \u201cresearch lab.\u201d In a series packed with malevolent adults, he\u2019s your requisite knight in shining armor, or at least with a shining police badge.<\/p>\n

The first few episodes give us a good running start to the series. To its credit, the adaptation is mostly faithful to the novel, and the pacing is quick without feeling frenetic. The depiction of the Institute\u2019s brutalist concrete architecture, its hallways adorned with disconcerting propaganda posters featuring smiling children juxtaposed with fascist slogans, quickly makes one\u2019s skin crawl. Combined with the torturous experiments and merciless staff, the setting easily taps into a host of primal human fears. All of this is straight out of the King playbook, and while this is an original tale, it incorporates elements the author previously explored numerous times; an elevator pitch might sound something like \u201cFirestarter meets The Shawshank Redemption\u201d: psychic children, an evil organization exploiting them, authoritarian nemeses, and a good ole-fashion prison break yarn all make it into the mix here.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

At first glance, The Institute seems to have excellent chances for success, with a creative team already familiar with King adaptations. Show runner and writer Benjamin Cavell contributed to the recent miniseries of The Stand, and executive producer\/writer Jack Bender worked on both Mr. Mercedes and Under the Dome. They clearly enjoy and understand the author\u2019s work, and it shows in a number of their creative decisions here. The photography is excellent throughout, with a polished look that betrays a likely hefty budget The Institute feel as though it would be easily at home as an original, seasonal tentpole series on any of the other major streaming services. It\u2019s a good-looking, well-paced thriller series, and it\u2019s off to an entertaining start.<\/p>\n

But for all its good looks and calculated pacing, The Institute isn\u2019t without some significant flaws that already, three episodes in, make it less compelling than the source material. The most obvious of these is, of course, their decision to \u201cage-up\u201d some of the child characters. In the novel, Luke is ten years old. As depicted here by Freeman, he\u2019s fourteen. That\u2019s a massive leap in terms of how we see the character of Nick Ellis, and how he\u2019s seen by his psychic peers, as well as the malevolent Institute staff. Instead of an innocent and precocious child, Ellis here is a gangly adolescent filled with the requisite teenage spite and defiance. That decision was, ostensibly, to spare viewers scenes of child-torture, but it results in a significant tonal change from the novel, making it more of sci-fi teen version of The Psychic Great Escape. I wouldn\u2019t say that the series is completely defanged by the age change, but it\u2019s certainly not as gut-clenchingly horrifying as in the novel. For certain devotees of all things King, the show would be much better served by leaning into the terror than shying away from it.<\/p>\n

There are some casting misfires here, too. Not the child actors, who do a tremendous job with emotionally challenging and nuanced roles, but with the adults. For some reason, Cavell decided to go with Parker for the role of Sigsby, and while she\u2019s a talented and capable actor, her innate tendency towards aloofness, which served her brilliantly on Weeds, doesn\u2019t fit her character at all. By contrast, Patricia Arquette plays a similar role on Severance to much greater effect, with more controlled menace than seems natural for Parker. I won\u2019t even get into the profoundly weird (and new to the story) scene in which she decompresses from work by dancing around her kitchen goofily to \u201cWerewolves of London\u201d while eating cut up hot dogs out of the pan and searing her leg with a white-hot clothes hanger. It\u2019s deeply weird, but not \u201cgood weird.\u201d The other institute staff feel like one-note caricatures, like the hammily sadistic med-tech\/prison guard Tony (Jason Diaz), and the medical director Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy), who comes off looking like Temu Vincent Price, right down to the pencil-thin mustache.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Ben Barnes radiates wholesome goodness and empathy that borders on Christlike. Maximum charisma and handsomeness is great for D&D characters, but it feels less than realistic or relatable here, no matter how charming and easy on the eyes Barnes is here.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, The Institute isn\u2019t a perfect or even great adaptation, but it\u2019s far from the worst in King\u2019s oeuvre, and even in spite of its missteps, there\u2019s enough solid drama and mystery here to keep even the most loyal \u201cconstant reader\u201d watching, this writer included. At the very least, fans will want to hang on until our young psychic teens start to wreak havoc on their enemies with all the unbridled teenaged fury of Charlie McGee or Carrie White. If that doesn\u2019t happen, I fear The Institute might be as cooked as the kids at Carrie\u2019s prom, but there\u2019s reason to be hopeful here. It might not be The Shining, but it\u2019s pretty good fun for mid-summer thriller TV, perfect for a scary late night snack.<\/p>\n

But for the love of all things holy, just not hot dogs, please.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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