Drama
The Pitt
Max’s new hospital drama The Pitt strives to be medically accurate. But while that’s a noble goal, this show comes with a whole lot of content, too.
Terry Maitland is guilty. No doubt about that.
An eyewitness saw 11-year-old Frankie Peterson get into the van with Terry, a beloved teacher and baseball coach in the small town of Flint City, Oklahoma. Folks saw Terry later, covered in blood. Police found his fingerprints all over the van, Frankie’s broken bike, the body of the boy himself. Well, what was left of him. Surveillance cameras caught Terry the night of the crime in town, acting strangely. Criminally.
Weird thing, though. Surveillance cameras caught Terry at a conference about 70 miles away that day, too—just where Terry said he was. Witnesses say he was there the whole time. He left fingerprints there, too. A television crew recorded him asking a question during a seminar on the very same afternoon—perhaps within 15 minutes—of when Frankie Peterson was killed.
Terry Maitland is innocent. No doubt about that.
He is unquestionably the killer, and undboutedly innocent. It makes no sense … except, perhaps, in the Flint City created by Stephen King.
The case seemed so easy at first. Everything fell into place for Det. Ralph Anderson. All the witnesses saw Terry, no question. All their statements rang true. The physical evidence was overwhelming. Anderson knew—knew—he had the killer. Even the cautious district attorney, Bill Samuels, was ready to take the case to court without hesitation. Forget no contest. This is a no-lose contest. Well, except for the grieving family, of course, for which there is no win.
So when incontrovertable evidence starts trickling in that seems not just to point, but prove Terry’s innocence, the D.A.’s inclined to bury it or burn it, just to preserve the case.
But Anderson’s determined to uncover the truth, no matter how improbable, no matter how inconvenient. Still grieving deeply over the loss of his own son to cancer, he wants to find justice for little Frankie. And if Terry’s not guilty, clearly they’ve got some work yet to do.
And it’d be nice to work fast. Murder never claims just one casualty, after all. The victim’s family, the accused’s family, the whole town is convulsing in agony. And even if the true killer is caught and brought to justice, the wounds will still take a long time to heal.
Horror-meister Stephen King has had quite a run lately, and it continues with HBO’s The Outsider, based on his 2018 novel of the same name. The show takes its cadence from many a prestige-TV serial-murder mystery, making it a compelling and perhaps compulsive watch underneath its grim, bleak trappings. And because an answer seems almost impossible to suss out—impossible, that is, without a King supernatural twist—The Outsider comes with an extra layer of intrigue.
But man, this show is a horror to watch, too.
It’s not just the horrors that we see and hear—though what we see and hear is, indeed, horrific. (Frankie suffered an unthinkable fate, and we don’t just hear how he suffered: We see, in gory detail, the aftermath.) It’s the aftershocks of the murder: how one death leads to the collapse of other lives, other families, other communities. The tragedy knows no borders. It doesn’t stop at the door but seeps through any cracks it can find—even, perhaps especially, the cracks found in our own hurting minds and souls. Even when one heart stops beating, the blood still flows.
Television has trod this territory before. In fact, it’s worn a path straight through it. And while The Outsider does have King’s distinctive fingerprints on it, which helps to differentiate the miniseries, are King’s fingerprints necessarily a good thing?
For a couple decades now, HBO has been home to some of television’s most praised, most controversial and most salacious bits of programming. The Outsider feels different from many HBO shows; instead of throwing open the bedroom doors to its viewers, it locks them in a dark, cold closet.
But it’s hard to say that’s an improvement.
A young boy’s body is found in the woods—the victim having been raped, mangled and murdered. A lawman on the scene tells Det. Ralph Anderson that deep teeth marks were found in the body, Anderson asks, “Animal?” “No,” the officer says. Suspicion quickly falls on baseball coach Terry Maitland, and the case against him initially seems airtight. But soon, just-as-conclusive evidence places him in an entirely different town at the time of the crime.
We see the gruesome remains of the boy, the blood-covered face on his barely identifiable body. Flesh has been torn away from the neck and sits in gory clumps, while the boy’s back looks as if it was torn by talons. We hear horrific details about the apparent sexual assault that took place as well.
We see Terry’s face and clothes covered in blood. In one scene, it looks as though the blood is predominantly around his mouth. (Terry, or his doppelganger, tells the someone who sees him that he got hit in the nose with a tree branch.) Later, the boy’s mother smashes up her dining room with a baseball bat, then collapses on the kitchen floor. A scene in the hospital later suggests the woman died. We see Det. Anderson and his wife visit their own dead son’s gravesite. We see blood on both a van and a tree.
After taking Terry into custody, Anderson angrily asks the accused killer if he’d ever touched his son. Before arresting Terry, Anderson confesses to his wife that he hopes Terry resists; and Anderson admits later he had two uniformed officers make the actual arrest because he worried that he wouldn’t be able to control himself around Terry. A worker at a strip club says he talked with Terry the evening of the killing and noted the blood on him. In black-and-white surveillance footage, we see bare-breasted dancers and scantily clad waitresses. The neon sign of the club is vaguely suggestive.
Before a baseball game—and well before Terry is accused—his youngest daughter asks him, “If two teams pray before a game, who does God pick?” Terry tells her (with prompting from his wife) that God doesn’t pick; when the girl asks why they pray, Terry says, “It helps them want to play at their very, very best, regardless of the outcome.” He also insists during the game that a smaller kid get a turn to bat—even though his lack of ability might mean the team would get booted out of the tournament.
An ex-con jokes with the detective who arrested him that he’s been to every sort of addictive recovery group imaginable: “Narcotics, alcoholics, gamblers, debtors, sexaholics … if I was any more anonymous, I’d be invisible.” In flashback, the man tells someone to “follow the drunks” to find the restroom. In security footage, “Terry” seems to use a crude hand gesture. We hear characters say the f-word seven times (including one with “mother” attached), the s-word six times and a variety of other profanities, including “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ss.” God’s name is misused four times, once with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused once.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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