 Thanks for checking out this show review video. So this is for the Stephen King book adaptation TV show that's on HBO currently. It's a 2020 release because it's just come out, the Outsider. Now I'm going to say up front a few things, one, there will be no spoilers for this review since it's such a new show and I would encourage people to watch it. So this, I do want to be able to talk about it kind of in a way that doesn't give spoilers out and so you can watch this but then go watch the show or you can watch the show and then come and watch this because if you've already watched it and you're watching this review there are certain things that you'll understand more as opposed to if you watch it before watching the show. So either way or if you want to you can watch it before and after, why not? So I will, the other thing I'm gonna say off the bat is I did a livestream last night and one of the questions came up of what's your favorite Stephen King adaptation movie? And I was like, you know, I gotta be honest, it's not a movie but having just come off of watching The Outsider, The Outsider might be my favorite adaptation other than The Shining. Obviously I love The Shining but that's kind of a whole other thing because Stephen King hated The Adaptation of The Shining but I happen to love it so The Outsider, unbelievable. So let's talk about this one. Based on a Stephen King book like I just said and the script was done by Richard Price who's written scripts for The Color of Money, Ransom. He wrote some scripts for the show The Wire on HBO and The Night Of, which is also on HBO and I have not seen but I had interest in and I probably will see at some point. So if I do, I'll do a review for it on here. Has Jason Bateman in it who actually directed two of the episodes in this? And that leads me to one of the things. The continuity of directing in this is great because they kept the same look. They kept the same feel throughout it. It's very, very seamless. You wouldn't really know that there were multiple directors for the episodes. It feels like it's one director pretty much and that's awesome. I imagine that's kind of hard to do. Excuse me. So Ben Mendelssohn is kind of the main character in this. He gets the most screen time and they kind of focus most on him but there are a lot of characters in this which is great. So he does an amazing job. I mean, first let me tell you, some of the other stuff he's been in. Captain Marvel, he was Talos and that. The Dark Knight Rises, Rogue One, Ready Player One, and he's a seasoned actor. He's a great actor. He does a really good job. But for some reason for me, I've seen him in a lot but when I saw him in The Outsider, this is by far his best role in my opinion. He did an amazing job on this and I really feel like he should win an Emmy for this one. He was out frigging standing, just the way he chewed scenery, the way he played his role so much, it's emotional. You can tell he was so in that character, amazing. And by and large, the acting in this is very good. I mean, it's HBO, so you would assume that would be the case. But you never know for sure, but this is great. I had a strong theory initially in this film, but that theory actually was out the window very early on. If people want to know what my theory was, if you've already seen the show, you can put a comment down here and I'll give it to you. I don't want to give it in the video because it might. It gives a little bit away of something that shows up actually in the first episode. So it's not deep into the show, but I don't want to say it, but if you want to know. But I was wrong. My theory was totally wrong. It was one of those like, you see something and that's your initial idea, like, maybe it's this, but no. It has a very dark and brooding atmosphere and I think part of that's helped with the music, obviously, because a lot of times music helps with mood significantly. But it's also helped with the kind of dampening of colors in it. There's a lot of desaturation of color in the film. And that's something that's done a lot in horror films now and actually just in film in general now, but it's particularly effective here. There's also a lot of slow moving camera shots, which I started to notice. Which sometimes I really get annoyed with a lot of camera movement like that. But it seemed to really work in this one. I don't know what it is. That also kind of helped to add to the atmosphere, add to the mystery feel of it. I don't know why, but it just did and I like that. The show runs on uncertainty and distrust for the audience. It's very much hard to know who's kind of telling the truth, who's not. How much is this person's perspective versus this person's perspective? Who has the best information? Who has all the information? Actually, no one has all the information at any time in this. And that's one of the great things about it is there's a lot of gray area with it. So you are conflicted. You don't really know what to do. There is this feeling of constant uncertainty, at least until the end. Towards the end of the last bunch of episodes, you pretty much know where we're going and how you should be thinking about things. But very early on for maybe the first half of the show, half of the full season, you're kind of uncertain. You're just like, do I trust this person? Do I trust this person? Is this person right? Is this person wrong? And it's cool. I like that. It's extremely true crime driven, which is good because true crime is a very big thing right now. I enjoy some true crime stories as well. So it helps kind of get people interested. But it's a good, I won't say too much, but it's kind of a good fusion of true crime and some other stuff. It's Stephen King. Just remember, it's Stephen King. You'll understand. There's a conflict between those who just want to put things to bed and take the easiest path to get there and those who want to do the hard work and get definitive answers. And that's the big thing with Sam Mentelson's character is he's the guy, as you would assume, as the main character who wants to dig deep, who wants to make sure that justice is done and everything is figured out, basically. And it just shows that dichotomy of what is basically real life, where you're always going to get the people who are just like, let's just say this is what happened and we'll call it quits, because I just want to put this to bed and move on versus the people who are like, no, I want to make sure that we're doing the right thing, that we got the right situation laid out, that we know everything involved. So they did a good job of representing that. There's a clear point made in this about how modern medicine focuses only on making sure your physical body works. And they pretty much couldn't care less about your actual mental health. Now, this ad is an actual problem in our society. A lot of people talk about it all the time is that mental health is not given enough attention. And our reality is mental. So if anything, we should be focusing more on that than the actual body aspect of it. Well, I mean, obviously it needs to be a balance actually, but we need to put more emphasis on the mental aspect. And this show makes a very good point with one of their characters of, you know, they just kind of have this attitude of, well, physically I'm fine, physically I'm fine, but mentally they're not. And they are very, very reluctant to kind of deal with those mental issues. And part of it stems from what society says. Society's kind of like, oh, it's all mental, just move ahead. You know, it's so easy just move ahead, but it's not. So it makes a really good point about that. It tackles the stigma of getting help for mental health and the shame that people feel that ties back into the whole societal thing. You definitely, people definitely, especially men, definitely have this feeling of I can't go to a health mental health professional because it's been make me look weak. It's not manly. I've literally talked to people, guys I know who are in a situation where they would like to go get help for mental health purposes, but they're afraid that if people find out that they're going to be looked at is not a man and a weak individual. So very unfortunate, but this show makes a good point about that as well. It makes a point of ugly citizen reactions to what they hear in the news that isn't necessarily the full story. Obviously this rings very, very true to society. We all know, especially with online culture, how people will see a headline, won't even read an article, will just see a headline and say, based off what I just read, that one sentence, I know everything and I'm just going to barrel ahead and say, this is what happened and you don't actually have the facts. And this show touches on that quite a bit about how society reacts to things, especially in like the newspapers and on TV and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, obviously that's a huge, huge issue in society because everyone wants to be right. I get it, but there's an issue when people don't want to take the time to get actual facts, but they want to be unbelievably belligerent about what they think they know. And the other thing is it kind of goes back to tie in like with the mental health stuff where people don't want to look weak. And if you admit that you were wrong and you change your mind on something, people feel like that means that they're weak and they don't want that. There's a stigma around that. And I personally believe there's a whole lot of strength in admitting that you were wrong about something, apologizing and moving forward and getting the facts. That's what we should be doing as a society. And this show kind of showcases that. The story isn't neat as in it's not clear how you should feel about everything going on because there are many sides presented. This kind of goes back to like what's perspective, what's not perspective, who has all the facts, who doesn't have all the facts, that type of thing. They do a good job of dropping interesting pieces of the whole thing at a good pace. So you could feel at times where it's moving a little bit slow, but I feel like they drop little breadcrumbs of the story at good enough intervals that it makes it feel like it's really, really moving. So even when it becomes very dialogue driven and this person's going here and talking to someone, then they're going here and talking to someone, they're going here and they're just kind of looking at a place. That would seem very boring, but they drop just like the little breadcrumbs of gradually revealing what's going on or going through the steps of getting to revealing what's going on. So it's good. They paste it really well. Has a lot of interesting characters who do feel very real and some of them, actually a good amount of them, actually feel complex. They're not one note characters and a lot of shows they'll just be like, oh, we're going to have extra characters, but everyone's just going to be like very flat, very static. These are dynamic characters and a bunch of them kind of change over time and it's cool. I already said the acting is great. It is the directing and cinematography adds to the creepy intense feel. There are a bunch of off kilter shots that convey something being wrong. That's one of the other things with this show. A lot of the camera angles are interesting. They'll have a lot of shots where they're like looking from like down, but it's not just like looking from down. It's like a little bit tilted too. They do a lot of that type of stuff that visually conveys that things aren't on the up and up. Things aren't straightforward and right in the world. That there's something weird. There's something off and it just looks great too. That's another thing is a lot of times there are shows and movies where they just kind of do a lot of straightforward filmmaking and all the shots are kind of straight on. When you can find interesting shots, interesting angles, that's great and they did it a lot with this show. So it keeps you visually engaged and I love that. The music increases the tense and eerie ambiance considerably in this. They did an awesome job matching the music. Wonderful. Great script writing with this, which I assume is not easy because adapting a book into a screenplay has got to be hard, especially a Stephen King book, which Stephen King books are notoriously long. The good thing about having a show for a Stephen King book is it's not a ton that you have to cut out. Whereas when you're adapting a Stephen King book to a movie, you only have like what maybe an hour and a half, two hours with a show like The Outsider, you have almost 10 hours basically. So you can get a lot more of the story in and not lose much. But the script writing, the screenwriting, Richard Price, I mean, he knocked it out of the park. There's a great point in this about humans always looking back and saying humanity was lacking knowledge in the past. But what about the present? What will we know in the future that we are wrong about now? It brings up this really interesting question that basically people will say, oh, well, we used to think blah, blah, blah as a society, but we're much smarter than that now. What do we think now that in the future, near and far, we're going to look back on and say, man, that was dumb that we thought that. And it brings that point up in the sense of be more open-minded, be more able to accept things you're seeing with your eyes and can really look into and try and figure out versus seeing it with your eyes and dismissing it as, well, it's just a blip in the matrix or it's, this doesn't make any sense. So I'm just going to go with what I know and move on. So the focus on trauma and grief is done in a way to make the point that it just doesn't go away unless you get to the root of it. And even then, there actually may still remain some remnants of it. It's a Stephen King story. Stephen King deals a lot with trauma, a lot with family trauma in particular, and this is no different. Joe Hill, also his son, deals with a lot of trauma, especially family trauma. I'm currently watching the show Lock and Key, which I will be doing a show review on as well, and same type of themes. But I think it works well. If you create a good story around it, it always works well as a nice, you know, kind of groundwork for a story. For a few characters, this speaks to how hard it is to have an open mind and diverge from the thought patterns you're taught. I already just kind of talked about that. I wasn't expecting so many characters to remain involved as long as they were, but it was awesome to have that. So with most of these shows, you get like one main character, and then you might get a few other characters who are along for the ride. This had considerably more characters than you would think, who stick throughout the story. And I wasn't expecting that, but it's cool. It's really cool to feel like you have a much bigger cast because you have more people that you're invested in in the story. And there's more. I feel like that also kind of opens it up to, especially if it's like a 10 episode show in each episodes about an hour, you can fill it with more interesting things because you're getting to know a lot of different characters. The characters are rich in this, and I really love that about it. And there's a lot of them. Anticipation is pretty high, and that leads to many red herring moments where you think something is going to happen, but it doesn't. And this serves very well for the moments that they actually choose to have something happen. That's another thing about building up the tension, making it, you know, so you can't really predict what's going to happen necessarily because there are so many moments in this where you're just on edge because you feel like, oh, there, you know, this is clearly a place where they're going to have something happen, and then it doesn't. And there are a bunch of those, but then littered in there, there are the moments where something does happen. So it keeps you guessing, really. And a lot of movies and shows don't do that anymore. It's very formulaic. You could pretty much tell when something's actually going to happen or not happen. But this one kept it, it kept it fresh. And I really enjoyed that about it. Satisfying ending. Very satisfying. Well, not very, but pretty satisfying ending for this. So many times shows are good throughout, and then they can't deliver on an ending. This one actually did it. A prime example that was on HBO, that couldn't deliver on an ending, but was amazing up until then. Obviously Game of Thrones, that is a prime example of a show that was unbelievably good and then just totally crap the bed in the last three or so episodes and just couldn't deliver an ending that people would even care about. It was terrible. But the outsider, so good throughout, finish is strong. It just makes you want more. It is really, really well done. And I was very pleasantly surprised with it. Like, I thought it had potential to be good based off a trailer I saw. It was even better. It was even better. It was slow at times, but you stayed engaged because it seemed like at any point something could happen or another piece of the puzzle could be revealed, which I kind of already talked about that, about good pacing with dropping the little clues or pieces of the bigger mystery, but also just keeping it tense and keeping you guessing. So this is really good. I mean, ooh, it's hard for a rating. Like, I don't, I have a hard time giving perfect ratings out because five stars is like, oh my God, it's like perfection. And this show, is it perfection? Not necessarily, but I feel like it's so close. So it makes me with five, out of five stars with half stars in play, it puts me between the four and a half and the five. If I could, if I did quarters, I would do 4.75, but I just feel like I got to give it five stars. It is so good. And like I said, it is potentially my favorite Stephen King adaptation. Like I said, I love, love, love, love the shining and that is in a way an adaptation. But if you're going to go to probably more faithful adaptation than outsider would be my favorite King adaptation, it is. I don't know how often I can actually say that about shows. So many times shows disappoint me and movies and this just, it just delivered. I wanted more and they pulled it off beautifully. So do more of this type of stuff, please, whoever, not just HBO, but thanks everyone for checking this out. Please put some comments down there. If you have seen the outsider, what are your thoughts on the outsider? Do you agree with me where the things you didn't like? Let's talk about that. Do me a quick favor, hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already, am I pointing in the right place where the subscribe is? Like right now? I don't know. But if you hit the subscribe, also make sure you hit the notification button because the little bell, because then you'll know whenever I'm putting up videos. But more importantly, you'll know when I'm jumping on for a live stream. And that's the big thing because I'm going to be doing more live streams. And there's more to come about that. I'll put out a video about it. But please pay me back by subscribing. If you've already subscribed, just give me a thumbs up to let me know you're still there. And obviously there's the comments. But thank you very much for taking your time to watch this. I really appreciate it. And until next time, keep it brutal.